Advertisement There are ways to enjoy your booming home surround system without punishing those around you. Here are some tips from Sound & Vision magazine:
TURN IT UP
You can avoid overall too-loud levels by raising the center channel volume only. And there’s another big sound adjustment you can make: Most noise-intrusion complaints deal with bass and can be solved by turning down the subwoofer often via the preset sound setting included in most surround sound receivers.
LOWER THE AMBIENT NOISE
If you’re watching a movie, the dishwasher is on, there’s a fan blowing, and your roommates are playing video games, you’ll crank up the movie sound level to compensate. By lowering ambient room noise, you can more easily listen to softer playback levels.
CHECK YOUR LAYOUT
Examine the layout of your house or apartment and figure out where you’re least likely to have direct audio contact with your neighbors. Speakers attached to a common wall, or placed hard against them, will more easily transmit sound to your neighbor. Detaching or moving speakers away from trouble spots helps. To isolate a room from other rooms, the room ideally should have solid walls and doors and windows with airtight seals. Common air-paths such as AC ducts easily convey air, and hence sound, to other rooms, so distance is your friend. The farther away a source room, such as the home theater, is from a receiving room, like a bedroom, the better. Finally, isolating the subwoofer from the floor helps. Use rubber feet, a carpet or a pad as buffers.
HEADPHONES
Of course, the easiest, no-brainer way to spare your friends, relatives or neighbors from the roar of jet fighters and proton torpedo blasts is to pump that sound directly into your ears. For surround sound systems, Sony offers the S-Air wireless audio transmission system, which includes a headphone connection — enabling the viewer to keep his phones near the couch or bed for convenient listening. And if you don’t mind the wired life, you can go with a different system: Any brand of headphone connected to a source with Dolby Headphone Technology. The beauty here is that you’ll get a 5.1 surround-sound simulation through those two cans on your ears.
