HTIB Shopping Tips and Guide About Price and Convenience

Well, remember that HTiBs exist for two basic reasons. The first is cost; the other is convenience.

How Big is Your Room? In the same way you should consider the size of your room when it comes to picking the right screen size of your TV, you need to take into account the amount of available space you have for the audio portion of your home theater system. For example, you probably don’t want an HTiB with large floorstanding speakers if you are trying to fit it all in an eight-foot by ten-foot room, along with a 60-inch rear projection HDTV. Likewise, if your room is more along the lines of 25-feet by 20-feet, you’ll probably want more than a 2.1-channel system with tiny satellite speakers and an equally tiny subwoofer.

What are You Going to Watch? The number of source inputs will be important if you have more than one A/V source component you want to use with the system. Do you have a DVD player, a satellite receiver or cable set-top box, and maybe a camcorder or a video game console? If so, you’ll need an appropriate number of A/V inputs. Some HTiB systems also include audio-only inputs, so make sure you have enough to cover all the video as well as audio sources.

Hearing is Believing. As with any audio system, the speakers are the most important part with regard to the overall sound quality. Unfortunately, you can’t compare the way speakers sound based on specifications or looks. Fortunately, your ears are the best test instruments in the world. And they’re free, too! There’s simply no substitute for actually listening to the system.

By now, any ideas you may have had that buying an HTiB would be quick and easy have probably been dashed. Actually, picking out the right HTiB for you is only as difficult as you want to make it. In many cases, an HTiB is perfect for the person who just wants to sit down and watch a movie without giving the electronics much thought. On the other hand, if you’re finding yourself spending lots of time making decisions about each aspect we’ve mentioned here, you might do better taking the time to pick out individual electronic components and match them with an HTiB speaker-only package. You’re likely to get better performance, and the result will be a system that’s tailored specifically for you and your room.