From the October 1994 issue of HOME THEATER TECHNOLOGY 
If You Like What You See Here, Don't Miss The Real Thing!
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High n' Mighty 

Home Theater "is" High-End Audio

The high-end audio system of the future will be a home theater.

by Corey Greenberg

Wanna know what Im sick n tired of? Crabby oldsters telling me that the things I dig arent as important or good as the things theyre used to. 
Rock n roll isnt real music. Glen Millernow thats REAL music!
Tylenol?! Bah! Coupla nice fat leeches on your foreheads the ticket, yessiree.
Ill put my old cast-iron typewriter up against your high-fallutin Pentium PC any darn day of the week, ya little punk! Hey! Come back here with my Depends! Why I oughta

And when it comes to hi-fi, nothingand I mean NOTHINGstrikes fear and loathing into the hearts of the audiophile old guard more than home theater and the people like me who dig it the most. The past few years have seen the marriage of audio and video infuse the consumer electronics biz with an air of vigor and excitement not seen since the introduction of CD over a decade ago. Yet, many dyed-in-the-wool audiophiles dis home theater as being nothing more than junior varsity hi-fi at bestloud, cheap boom n tizz to dazzle the Mud People, but hardly the refined, educated, quality-driven pursuit that is high-end audio.
I mean, its kind of wacky when you think about it: youve got hardcore audiophiles who spend all their time by themselves in the basement endlessly tinkering with their systemrarely if ever happy for very long with its sound
and yet these same people sneer openly with yellow rat teeth at home-theater owners who kick back with a smile on a nightly basis with the rest of their family to enjoy their favorite movies, TV shows, and music. Does that seem as funny to you as it does to me?
Whats happening here is that traditional high-end audio is dying, and no one knows it better than audiophiles themselves. The high-end has been largely an elitist-oriented hobby from day one, and hasnt made any real effort toward inviting the general public to join the party. In fact, erecting a firewall of confusing jargon and restrictions on any other musical tastes but classical has effectively dissuaded the general public from taking part in the hobby. Compound this with the high-ends tendency to address the general public with the tone of a master race t-a-l-k-i-n-g s-l-o-w-l-y to the genetically impure, and its no wonder the general public has ignored specialist hi-fi. Add in the old-timers negative stance toward letting video and the rest of the family into the same room as the stereo, and high-end audio has found itself without a new generation of audiophiles, while the current oldsters are dying off in droves.
Quite naturally, the high-end audio biz is pissed.
And when it looks across the aisle at the tremendous market penetration and success of home theater, it gets even more pissed. Which is perfectly understandableafter all, history shows that every time something new comes along that promises to push the cosmic apple cart forward, the tribal elders react with fear and derision. Remember Elvis? Democracy? The Dreamsicle? The elders always fail to see positive evolutionary forces as anything but uppity hormone-crazed young uns and their wild jungle music. Thats why, instead of correctly seeing home theater as a natural progression of high-end audio as it becomes assimilated by the general public, the audiophile community tars it as Hee-Haw Hi-Fi for people who dont care about 
sound quality.
To me, this is nonsense. Home theater is high-end audio, or at the very least can be as long as your goal is to marry high-quality audio to your video. If you take the time to investigate your options and assemble a home-theater system with both good-sounding gear and proper set-up, what you wind up with ista-daa!nothing less than a bona-fide high-end audio system.
The bottom line is that high-end means mo better, whether youre talking about audio, video, cars, or even bagels, for that matter. Ever tried chewing your way through a Lenders bagel from your friendly grocers freezer? Did it even approach in any way shape or form the kind of near-erotic bliss you get from chomping on a fresh NY deli bagel? The point is, if something is high-quality, its high-end. 
Whether the high-end audio industry likes it or not, the high-end audio system of the very near future will be a home theater that features audio and video, and the audio will be multichannel surround sound, not two-channel stereo. The world is upgrading to multichannel sound, and as technological paths continue to blur the distinctions between your computer, your telephone, your TV, and your hi-fi rig toward one all-encompassing multimedia system, a home theater will be the control center of the whole kit n kaboodle. Today, a home theater is used mostly for movies and TV shows; tomorrow, its going to be anything and everything that comes into your home with a picture and sound. One world, one love, one system.
Now, when I say that home theater is high-end audio, it helps if we first agree on just what high-end audio is in the first place. Its really pretty simplea high-end audio system is a music playback system that accepts nothing less than the best in hardware and setup so that the sound you hear is as close to the sound of the original musical event as possible. No matter whether its Mendelssohn or the Mentors, a high-end audio system will let you hear every detail in the recording with natural ease and a freedom from that gritty, canned Muzak sound you hear from department store rack systems. A great high-end audio rig is like a race-tuned Ferrari compared to a Ford Escort off a dealers lot. Every part throughout the system is hand-picked for the highest performance, and every alignment point is painstakingly tuned for maximum vroom.
Its the same with high-end audio. The first time I ever sat down and listened to a really great system, I was flooredit had just never occurred to me in all my years of living with mediocre audio gear that artificially reproduced music could sound so damn real. And once heard, you never wanna go back.
And if its the same for high-end audio, its the same for home theater, too. For years I watched movies at home on a 19-inch color TV with the sets own crappy lil built-in speaker squawking away, and I never thought twice about it. But once I sat down to a demonstration of the same movies on a full-blown home-theater system, I realized just how much Id been missing in terms of getting the whole cinematic and sonic experience delivered to my eyes and ears. And once I set up my own home theater, the gap between my experiences at the local theater and watching movies in my living room narrowed to the point where its pretty much a tossup now. The state of the home-theater art still hasnt quite reached the visual definition of film, but in terms of sound, you can easily equal or surpass what you hear at even the best theaters, right in your very own living room.
Now, Ive really been laying into my audiophile pals here, so I gotta give their concerns about home theater equal time. There are some technical and physical hurdles associated with a multichannel home-theater system that can limit its sound quality compared to a good two-channel audio rigif youre not careful. Without proper setup, especially with regards to where you place the speakers in your living room, the sound wont be very impressive at all. And until very recently, the audio quality of even the best surround-sound processors, receivers, and multichannel amplifiersthe heart of any serious home theaterjust wasnt up to the ultimate transparency and freedom from gritty sound as the better high-end gear on the market.
But thats rapidly changing. This past year has seen several forward-thinking high-end manufacturers apply their design expertise to a whole new breed of home-theater components that are every bit as clean-sounding as the best high-end audio gear. Madrigals wonderful-sounding Proceed PAV surround processor/preamp 
[Featured in this months Premiere Designs.Ed.] and Meridians Music and Cinema Surround System are shining examples of this new breed, and as more high-end manufacturers get into the act, we should begin seeing many more audiophile-grade home-theater components. Even affordable surround receivers have gotten a lot better in terms of sound than the models of just a year ago, as the big Japanese manufacturers, such as Pioneer and Onkyo, begin to understand whats really important (equal power for the front three channels and high-quality Dolby Pro-Logic decoding chips) for a good surround receiver 
and whats not (fake ambience echo effects and other useless 
bells n whistles). 
Home-theater speakers, too, have been an area of major concern for hardcore audiophiles, and with good reason. At the beginning of the home-theater boom when everyone was scrambling around trying to figure out the whole equation, the Lucasfilm group, of Star Wars fame, organized an effort to instill many of the design guidelines behind their THX commercial cinema program into the home-theater arena. The resulting Home THX licensing program guided speaker and electronics manufacturers to design home-theater components to THXs own ideas of what was best for movie theater-like sound in the typical living room. 
This was a very controversial program, however, because while some of THXs ideas were good, such as making sure that amplifiers and speakers could deliver adequate levels of distortion-free sound for the proper playback of movie soundtracks, their notions of what a home-theater speaker should be run quite counter to generally-accepted and time-proven high-end speaker design philosophy. The result was THX-licensed speakers thatin the opinion of many hi-fi critics, including myselfsound impressive on multichannel movie soundtracks, but fall short of many non-THX speakers when playing stereo music recordings. This sparked the movies or music controversy that has so consumed the audio press of late, and led many audiophiles to reject the whole notion of home theater as an all-encompassing system for movies and music. 
Fortunately, this trend seems to have died down in the past year, with manufacturers learning from their mistakes and realizing that they had been right all alongthat a great high-end speaker is what sounds best for music and movies, and that a speaker that cant do both equally well has no business being in a serious home theater. The current trend is toward using five identical high-end music speakers for the left, center, right, and surround channels, along with one or more subwoofers to handle the low bass. My own experience has demonstrated that this approach is capable of stunning sound on both music and movies, thus making for a true high-end home theater. With the lessons learned this past year on the part of electronics and speaker designers, theres no reason why a home theater has to give up any sonic ground wh
atsoever to the best conventional two-channel audio-only system.
As youll learn in forthcoming issues of Home Theater Technology, home theater is high-end audioas long as you do it up right. And doing it up right is what HTT is all about. Were going to tell you about all the latest products in home audio/video, and were going to run these puppies through the ringer to find out which ones really deliver the goods. Because when you go into a Hi-fi Hut looking to score some gear, we want you to be armed 
and ready.
Welcome to the New School of audio/video coverage, and get ready to have mo fun in your living room than you ever thought possible. Its about damn time, dont you think?

 1994 Home Theater Technology Magazine

From the October 1994 issue of HOME THEATER TECHNOLOGY 
If You Like What You See Here, Don't Miss The Real Thing!
Subscribe Today To HOME THEATER TECHNOLOGY Magazine
On Newstands everywhere or 
Call (800) 264-9872 To Subscribe - $23.95 For A Full Year

