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The definitive guide to surround speaker placement: 5.1 channel, 7.1 channel, Dolby atmos, height channels, side channels, rear effects channels . . . What's the optimal location for these speakers?

Continuing our series on home theater system tips and tricks that you can use, and many of them are free, we're going to talk today about subwoofers, a very, very important part of any home theater system. Because those big low-frequency effects and explosions and things, I mean, they really wouldn't be what they are without a good subwoofer in the system.

Here's another tip to improving your center channel performance to get better dialog: a totally free, easy-to-do one minute center channel speaker hack.

As more and more people have started consuming their music through streaming services or files that they have either on a phone or a tablet, they often become dissatisfied by the sound quality of listening in that tiny little speaker that's built into their smartphone.

Center channel: a speaker that doesn't get much respect, but one that does a lot of heavy lifting, especially with today's soundtracks. If you're looking to improve your TV's sound, check out our latest video.

Soundbar or speaker? Which is the one to use? Now, given the fact that you're interested in the answer to that question is a great thing because it means that you're looking at improving your television sound quality.

You may have wondered why you see subwoofer corner placement in some rooms, and placement along the front wall or side wall in others. You might be wondering, what is it, why would I want to do that, and what's it gonna benefit me? What's the result?

If you watched any of our speaker setup videos that talk about placement in regular rooms, in odd-shaped rooms, toe-in, and all those other aspects of setting up your speakers, you’ve heard me refer to using certain setup or test tracks. One thing that I haven’t done is gone through some of the albums that I use when I’m setting up a pair of speakers in a new room. It’s a wide variety of different types of music.

Is it time to take your home theater experience up a notch? Then consider moving to a Dolby Atmos set up!

So you've decided you want to become an audiophile or get into the audio hobby. That's a wonderful thing. But there are a lot of pitfalls particularly today where we get so much of our information online. So I'd like to share some suggestions and some things that I would recommend totally avoiding if you're just starting out with your first good audio system.