Using My New Home Entertainment System

Do I need professional help to set up my home entertainment system?

You should always get professional help in setting up your system, especially if you've already invested thousands of dollars in buying all this equipment. Investing a little bit more will make sure that you get full use and satisfaction out of having it in your house. A professional installer can help you on alot of fronts. One is, they can help you hide all your cables, that's first and foremost. Secondly, they can help integrate all the control of the system into one remote control and make sure that it works and functions consistently, time in, time out. They can also make all of the interconnects, all the connections behind the system, so that you plug the right cable in the right thing. Finally, they can tune the audio and video so that it looks as good as it can in that particular location given the equipment that you have.

What kind of wiring might I need done for a new entertainment system?

When you buy a new entertainment system, especially if you're going to hang a TV on the wall, you're going to need to consider, seriously consider, running two types of cable in your wall. Most of our clients that buy flat screen TV's buy them because they want to position them on the wall, hanging them like a picture, and you don't want to ruin that image, or that experience, by having a couple of wires hanging down from the TV and getting plugged into your stereo. So you're going to have to consider running those speakers-those wires- through the wall. You're also going to need to consider and figure out how to get electricity up to the TV. Most of the time, when we're doing installations, we're also running an electrical outlet to the rear of the TV, so that you have power without seeing a power cable. Many times when we're at a client and we're actually doing the installation, we recommend to them that they pull what they call "conduit" in some harder to reach locations. And what that allows us to do is, in the future, if there is new cabling technology, or a new standard comes along, it allows us to future-proof the house because pulling cable through conduit doesn't-it means that we don't have to open the walls. It can be done quickly. It can be done for far less cost than having to go through and open walls and pitch cable through walls.