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Building a Home Theater Sound System From Scratch? Here's What to Buy First

Nick Lewis

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  • Speakers, on the other hand, change much more slowly. Every once in a while, someone comes along with a modification to existing designs, but one basic fact holds: speakers that sound good today will sound good 10 years from now, so long as you take care of them. They’re not going to be aggressively out-classed by the latest and greatest in speaker technology.
  • If you’re piecing together a home theater system, you should buy your front left and right speakers first. They’re the workhorses of a home theater setup, and you can still have an enjoyable experience even if you never add anything else to the system.
  • Front left and right speakers are typically either bookshelf or tower speakers.
  • Tower speakers are larger, heavier (and difficult to move alone), but can deliver deeper bass than bookshelf speakers. They also don’t require stands of any kind—put them on the ground, and you’re good to go.
  • I’m partial to tower speakers because I’ve lived in places that couldn’t fit a subwoofer, and the extra bass from the tower speakers was enough to make up for the lack of really deep bass.
  • On the other hand, bookshelf speakers are a completely acceptable solution, especially if you buy or will be buying a subwoofer. Bookshelf speakers can easily be moved around and setup by one person, and they’re a bit easier to protect from pets, if that is a factor for you. They do require some sort of stand, though if your TV stand is wide enough, you may be able to put them on that.
  • Your Tweeter Matters Broadly speaking, woofers are woofers, and while the quality and materials can vary, there isn’t a huge difference in their fundamental design. Tweeters are a different story. Tweeters come in a ton of different varieties, all with different sound profiles. Some of the most common ones are: • Dome Tweeters • Air Motion Transformer (AMT) • Horn • Planar Magnetic Tweeters
  • Dome tweeters are the most common kind, and they resemble a regular speaker woofer in both appearance and function. They’re less expensive, have a relatively wide sound dispersion area (which means they sound the same regardless of where you’re sitting in a room), but they tend to produce less detailed sound.
  • AMT and Planar Magnetic Tweeters are also relatively common, but they’re more expensive. They work in different ways, but they both tend to produce cleaner high-end frequency sound than dome tweeters. Unlike dome tweeters, they also produce relatively focused sound, which means your position while listening is more important.
  • Horn tweeters are larger and get louder, but in my experience, tend to have the worst audio fidelity of the options here. If you’re buying speakers a PA system to DJ a party they might be a good choice, but I’d avoid them in a home theater system.
  • Of all these options, I’m partial to AMT tweeters, since I also listen to a lot of music on my home theater system a lot. AMT tweeters really do justice to guitars, violins, and other instruments that produce higher-frequency sounds.
  • If I were buying bookshelves and pairing them with a subwoofer, I’d probably look for speakers with woofers between 5 and 6 inches. If I were buying towers, especially if I were forgoing a subwoofer completely, I’d recommend picking up something with 6.5-inch woofers for the extra bass delivery.
  • Once you have your front speakers, you need something to power them. You can buy a separate amplifier designed to drive just two speakers, or you can buy a more complicated audio/video receiver (usually just called a receiver or an AVR). AVRs are pretty complicated devices. They’re usually capable of driving at least five speakers, including your front left and right speakers, your center channel, and your surrounds. More expensive models can power more than a dozen speakers. The price also varies wildly, from a few hundred dollars for something that can drive an 5.1 system to many thousands of dollars for something capable of driving 19 channels. AVRs that support 7.2.4 sound—that is 7 speakers around you, two subwoofers, and 4 ceiling speakers—start around 1,400 dollars if you can catch a good deal.
  • Once you have your AVR and your front left and right speakers, you need to fill out the rest of your system. If you bought bookshelf speakers, the next thing you should buy is definitely a subwoofer. If you bought tower speakers, I’d recommend a center channel next—it makes a huge difference for television and movies.