As the owner of HAVPRO electronics in Arizona, Ryan Beaugureau makes it his business to ensure all his clients are watching their TVs at the optimum performance levels. In this article, he shares that same knowledge with us, and explains what simple tricks anyone can do to improve the way his entertainment system functions.
Although there are a few instructional DVDs available to show people how to set up their own TVs, I just don’t think most people would understand how to do everything those videos are asking them to do. With that in mind, I think it’s better to stick to the basics when it comes to setting up your TV, and to call in an expert if you start thinking about doing anything especially complex.
When a television set is first taken out of the box, it needs to be properly set up before you will start seeing a picture in the way it’s meant to be seen. The reason why new owners have to do this is because TVs coming straight out of the box have been set up to look great on a showroom floor, and they do that by maxing out all the colors to their brightest possible capabilities.
Leaving the TV on these ultra-bright settings, however, is going to make it wear down faster than it would if you were to reduce the settings and bring down the brightness to a more standard level. And as long as you are planning on watching the TV inside your home—as opposed to on a showroom floor—then those basic brightness and contrast settings are probably going to be perfectly fine, especially since you won’t be trying to draw anyone’s attention to your particular television over another particular television when you’re watching TV inside your home.
Most televisions on the market today have their own digital system that allow users to go in and select the color palate that they want, and there is a little preference in there for everybody. Because we don’t all have the same preferences when it comes to colors that we like seeing and what we think is the optimum coloring, most TVs now let users choose between cool or warm color hues.
If you are someone who prefers your television screen look a little redder, then you would choose the warm hue option. If you are someone who prefers that your screen to look a little bluer, then you would go with the cool hue setting. Either way, it is fairly simple to go in and just play with the video settings until you get a feel for the coloring that looks the best to your eye.
How to mprove the audio quality of your new HDTV
If you are planning on just listening to your TV by itself, without installing surround sound speakers, then there is not a whole lot you can do to improve the quality of the sound you are hearing. Although a handful of brands make televisions with slightly better speakers, most television speakers are underpowered and inadequate.
The Mitsubishi TV line in particular is one that is known for having better-than-average speakers. In fact, the company is now coming out with a television that has a feature called a built-in sound bar. So with that, they actually have what is essentially a 16-speaker system built right into the television, which gives the TV a lot more power than those made by other companies. So you can really fill a room with the sound from one of Mitsubishi’s new TVs, and that is good thing.
Along these same lines, I recently installed a new TV in a room where one of my clients has his treadmill and an exercise bike, and I made sure to install a quality audio Mitsubishi televisions so that he could actually hear the TV while he was working out—since it takes a high volume to be able to hear the TV over the noise of all the gym equipment. So that worked out really well for that client.
If you are planning on going above and beyond the standard TV speakers, then my best advice to optimize that sound quality is to make sure to use the HDMI or fiber optic cables to get a good digital sound, rather than those old analog red and white cables. A digital audio cable is another option that you could use, since it would also help improve your sound quality greatly.
The other issue is that if you are using a receiver, then that will most likely come with a specific microphone that you can position to automate the speaker setup process. These automated microphones are pretty cool, since they time all the speakers in the room to ensure that the sound coming out of them hits the same spot—such as your couch—at the same time. So that allows you to optimize the sound in your receiver without much technical knowledge or expertise.
What is important for people to understand is that they do need to optimize their televisions in order to improve its output quality and increase its lifespan, but that optimization does not have to be difficult or hard. If you aren’t sure how to do anything I just described, just call a professional installer and have him come over and set up your system for you.
