Home theater, however, isn’t just a pretty picture. Consumers eager to add aural excitement to home theater’s visual excitement are snapping up surround sound audio systems at an accelerating pace. These systems unlock surround sound information encoded on VHS tapes and DVD-Video discs and delivered by local TV stations, cable operators and satellite-TV services.
Marketers generally attribute the popularity of home-theater audio equipment to the unprecedented growth of DVD hardware and software sales.
What Surround Sound Does
On disc or tape, even first-generation surround sound – Dolby Surround – puts you in the center of the action, enveloping you with the background sounds of a driving rainstorm or thunderous earthquake.
Dolby Surround also enhances dialog intelligibility by channeling dialog to a single TV-top center-channel speaker. The center channel ensures that the voices of on-screen actors come from the same direction as their images even when you're sitting off to one side of the room. The left/right speakers, freed from the task of producing dialog, concentrate on widening and deepening the sound stage.
Surround speakers, in turn, envelop listeners with the sounds of explosions, rainstorms and other ambient sounds that further enhance the illusion of being there.
Getting Surrounded
Dolby Surround is available on more than 13,000 films for movie theater playback and on many pre-recorded VHS tapes and DVD discs for home-theater playback. Local analog TV stations, cable operators and satellite-TV operators also deliver Dolby Surround.
As of January 2003, almost 40 percent, or 760, of the nation’s 2,045 full-power analog TV stations (commercial and public) could broadcast a stereo signal and were therefore capable of delivering Dolby Surround to homes, according to the latest available statistics from the Broadcasting & Cable yearbook. That's up from 690 as of January 2001.
The number of households capable of enjoying surround broadcasts also rose. By January 2005, 73 percent of all households were equipped with stereo-capable color TVs, CEA said. That’s up from 65 percent in January 2000.
