SV Sound warranty A Glossary of Home Theater Terms, SV Subwoofers

SV Subwoofers Page 11

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:

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 6 channels of movie audio .

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

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

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

HT - “Home Theater”. What you make of it. But a home (theater) without 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 Hz is generally considered mid-bass above which most large full range speakers can easily produce. The real fun (and real) bass, is in the middle of that range, call it 20-40 Hz.

LD - Laserdisc, grandfather to the DVD. Still capable of great picture and sound. Increasingly going the way of the vinyl 33 1/3 LP record.

LFE - “Low Frequency Effects” are the “.1” channel in 5.1 or 6.1 chan- nel sound-tracks. If you have a sub selected in your system, any LFE signal goes there. 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.

Sub - Short for subwoofer

“5.1” - Refers to 5 full range channels and one bass only channel. Now often reproduced as “6.1” channels, including a center rear speaker..