Home Theater System Arkansas

Home cinema, also called home theater, seeks to reproduce cinema quality video and audio in the home. The video aspect usually involves a large-screen and/or high definition television or a projection system with movie screen to project the image on. Quality audio reproduction is usually achieved with a high fidelity surround sound system.

A home theater system is a combination of electronic components designed to recreate the experience of watching a movie in a theater. When you watch a movie on a home theater system, you are more immersed in the experience than when you watch one on an ordinary television. To see how home theaters do this, let's first look at the original model -- the movie theater. People have had VCRs in their homes for years, and in the United States, there are video rental stores everywhere. So why do we keep spending so much money going to the movie theater in Arkansas if we can watch the movie in our own home for so much cheaper? We go because the theater offers us an amazing experience we just don't get at home. There are a few main components that make watching TV and going to the movies very different.

One of the biggest differences is the sound experience. When you go to see a movie in a quality movie theater, you'll hear the music, sound effects and dialogue not just from the screen, but all around you, A standard movie theater has three speakers behind the screen -- one to the right, one to the left and one in the center -- and several other speakers spread out in the rest of the theater.

In this surround sound system, you hear different parts of the soundtrack coming from different places. When somebody on the left side of the screen says something, you hear it more from the left speaker. And in a movie like "Star Wars", you hear a rumbling swoosh travel from the front of the theater to the rear as a spaceship flies toward the camera and off the screen. You are more involved in the experience of watching a film because the world of the movie is all around you.

The second chief component of the theater experience is the large size of the movie screen. In a theater, the screen takes up most of your field of view, which makes it very easy to lose yourself in the movie. After all, you're sitting in the dark with only one thing to look at, and everything you're looking at seems much bigger than life.

We also enjoy going to the movies because we can see everything so well. Film projectors present very large, clear pictures. The detail is much sharper than what we see on an ordinary 19-inch television, and the movement is much more fluid. We may not consciously recognize this, but it does make a significant difference in how we enjoy a movie. When we can see more detail, we are more engrossed in the world of the movie.

The basic idea of a home theater is to recreate these elements with home equipment.

In the 1950s, home movies became popular in the United States and elsewhere as Kodak 8 mm film (Pathé 9.5 mm in France) and camera and projector equipment became affordable. Projected with a small, portable movie projector onto a portable screen, often without sound, this system became the first practical home theater. They were generally used to show home movies of family travels and celebrations but also doubled as a means of showing private stag films. Dedicated home cinemas were called screening rooms at the time and were outfitted with 16 mm or even 35 mm projectors for showing commercial films. These were found almost exclusively in the homes of the very wealthy, especially those in the movie industry.

Portable home cinemas improved over time with color film, Kodak Super 8 mm film film cartridges, and monaural sound but remained awkward and somewhat expensive. The rise of home video in the early 1970s almost completely killed the consumer market for 8 mm film cameras and projectors, as VCRs connected to ordinary televisions provided a simpler and more flexible substitute.