SV Sound PB12-NSD manual Glossary of Home Theater Terms

SV Sound Page 13

A Glossary of Home Theater Terms

Don’t feel guilty if you want to skip over the below. But if you are curi- ous about what some of the terms and abbreviations stand for, read on:

CD - Compact Disc, the music standard and capable of great sound. Now joined by Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio as high- resolution music alternatives that can really make subwoofers great audio upgrades.

dB - Short for “deci-Bell” a unit of sound, a 3dB increase takes twice the acoustic power to attain!

DD- “Dolby Digital”, the most popular form of digital surround sound, usually found on DVD soundtracks. Actually a compression algorithm that can provide 1 to 7 channels of movie audio .

DPL - “Dolby Pro Logic”. The last generation of non-discreet channel surround sound. Derived from 2 “matrixed” analog channels.

DTS - “Digital Theater System” similar to DD, but often with less com- pression. Many feel it sounds better than DD, but you be the judge.

DVD - Amazing little video disk, DVD, officially doesn’t mean anything!

HT - “Home Theater”. What you make of it. But a home (theater) with- out a subwoofer, isn’t quite up to our definition!

Hz - Short for Hertz, the German scientist who came up with a scheme of measuring the frequency of sound waves. 15-30 Hz is very low bass and very rare in anything but movie soundtracks. 60-80 Hz is generally con- sidered mid-bass above which most large full range speakers can easily produce. The real fun (and most common) deep bass, is in the middle of that range, call it 20-40 Hz.

LFE - “Low Frequency Effects” are the “.1” channel in 5.1 or 6.1 chan- nel soundtracks. If you have a sub selected in your system, any LFE sig- nal goes to the subwoofer. The sub may get bass from other channels as well however, depending on the “size” of speakers in your set-up.

RMS - A common and accurate way to rate the power of an amplifier. Literally “Root Means Squared”. Typically measured in “watts”.

SPL - “Sound Pressure Level”, a fancy way of saying “Volume”. Usu- ally measured in dBs. SPL meters are critical to setting your surround sound. Doing so by ear is nearly impossible.

Sub - Short for subwoofer