The first step to maximizing your home viewing experience is to get a nice big HDTV. Some people stop there, but if you really want to bring a true movie theater experience home to your Forest Hill condo, you need to go one step further and get yourself a surround sound system. It's surround sound, not plush seats or oil-popped popcorn, that defines the movie experience. Here are some tips for understanding, choosing, and installing your at home surround sound.

Amateur home theater creators think that all they need for surround sound is a bunch of speakers and subwoofers, but surround sound isn't about making the movie louder. It's about making the movie sound more realistic. Surround sound uses its multiple speakers in concert to make the movie sound real. With surround sound, you'll forget you're in your Toronto loft and instead imagine yourself on a dinosaur riddled island, with chirps, creaks, roars, and rustles coming at you from different angles.

The core of the surround sound system, then, is not the speakers, but the control box. The control box decodes the audio information contained in the television program or DVD and separates it into channels. The most common channel configurations for home theater are 5.1 and 7.1. When assembling it in your Ajax real estate, the 5 or the 7 represents the number of speakers and the .1 represents the subwoofer, as low frequency sounds don't need as much bandwidth as the others.

Because the control box and the speakers have to work in tandem, it is only really advisable to create your own surround sound system if you're an audio expert. If your only experience with sound production was playing the team building drums at your work retreat, it's best to leave the installation to the professionals. You'll also want their advice in choosing a system, too, as they range from about $100 for a pre-packaged electronics store system to several thousand dollars for a professional one.

In order to make the best use of your surround sound system once it's installed, you'll want to match your content to the system's capabilities. Check the back of the DVD and Blu-Ray boxes to see which type of system they are optimized for. Choosing the wrong one may result in a less than optimal rendition of your day at the Edmonton day spa over your home theater system.