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Page 13
A Glossary of Home Theater Terms
Don’t feel guilty if you want to skip over the below. But if you are
curious about what some of the terms and abbreviations stand for, read
on:
CD - Compact Disc, the music standard and capable of great sound.
Now joined by Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio as high-
resolution music alternatives that can really make subwoofers great
audio upgrades.
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 7 channels of movie audio .
DPL - “Dolby Pro Logic”. The last generation of non-discreet channel
surround sound. Derived from 2 “matrixed” analog channels.
DTS - “Digital Theater System” similar to DD, but often with less
compression. 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. 60-80 Hz is generally
considered mid-bass above which most large full range speakers can
easily produce. The real fun (and most common) deep bass, is in the
middle of that range, call it 20-40 Hz.
LFE - “Low Frequency Effects” are the “.1” channel in 5.1 or 6.1
channel soundtracks. If you have a sub selected in your system, any
LFE signal goes to the subwoofer. 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”.
Usually measured in dBs. SPL meters are critical to setting your