Nobody wants to put up wit the cold or heat, traffic or rip-off prices just to see a great movie when you can have the same experience in the comfort of your lounge room.
Thanks to the huge range of Home Cinema systems available these days, getting the Hollywood experience is relatively affordable. Most people who invest in a home cinema system leave the setting up to the dealer they bought it from.
Others enjoy the challenge and do it themselves. Which is fine for basic home cinema systems but not recommended for more upmarket models which require an experienced hand for the installation.
Cheap and cheerful home cinema systems are fairly easy to set up requiring no more than half an hour of your time. Here’s how the pieces fit together.

1 All the cables you need are usually supplied with the system. All the speaker cables connect to the back of your audio-video receiver. To ensure you hear the surround soundtrack the way Hollywood wants you to hear it check that you’re connecting each of your speakers to the correct terminals on the receiver. For example, the Right and Left speakers are connected to the terminals on the receiver marked ”Front Right” or ”Rear Left” speaker.
2
Once all the speakers are wired up to the receiver it’s time to connect the DVD or Blu-ray player to the corresponding input on the receiver. Some players come with a low grade cable terminated in red and white connections. The red plug goes into the ”Right” channel input on the receiver. The white plug is the left channel. Some players and receivers have HDMI connections as well as plugs. HDMI stands for High Definition Multi Media Interface. If your equipment has these connections it’s worth investing in a HDMI cable.

3
Checking that you have everything connected correctly is simple because the majority of receivers have a test tone setting which you can access via the system’s remote control The test tone will play through each speaker sequentially and as it goes from one speaker to another you will hear the words ”Right Speaker”, ”Left Speaker”, etc.