Pat Hurley

Most A/V receivers include ample audio inputs (both digital and analog). Audio inputs on an A/V receiver let you connect the audio outputs of DVD players, CD players, game consoles, HDTV tuners, Media Center PCs, digital audio players for MP3 and other computer audio, and many newer digital cable set-top boxes or DSS satellite receivers.

USB is a serial bus standard that allows you to connect peripheral devices to a PC. In a home theater, USB can be found on the back of many computer-like source devices, such as MP3 servers and PVRs. Following are some details on USB connections and devices: Most printers, external modems, handheld computers, portable MP3 players, and other PC peripheral devices connect to PCs via USB.

Speaker cables connect the outputs of the power amplifier or the amplifier section of the receiver to the speaker. These cables carry the high-powered electrical currents required to move the internal components of the speaker (the magnets that move the drivers). You need one pair of speaker cables for each speaker in your home theater (except the subwoofer, if it's an active system that uses an analog audio interconnect cable).

Video displays use one of two scanning methods to draw the picture on the TV screen: interlaced and progressive. All HDTVs are progressive-scan displays — so even if the signal being sent to the HDTV is interlaced, the HDTV will convert it to progressive scan for display on the screen. Here's what you need to know when comparing the two scanning methods: Interlaced scan: Traditional TV systems (such as NTSC, the standard TV system in the United States) use an interlaced scan, where half the picture appears on the screen at a time.

Many home theater A/V receivers include multizone functionality, which lets your receiver control your home theater and provide music to multiple rooms. A multizone receiver is a good way to get started down the whole-home theater path. Multizone A/V receivers run the gamut from fairly simple to very sophisticated.

Many cable companies now offer video-on-demand (VoD) as part of their digital cable services. With VoD service, you pay for individual movies and shows, and watch them on your cable-connected TV — similar to the concept of how pay-per-view (PPV) works. But the similarities between VoD and PPV end there, because: VoD movies aren’t run as scheduled broadcasts (like every hour on the hour PPV movies).

Most A/V receivers use IR systems for their remote controls. Because IR can't penetrate walls, you need a wired system that can carry IR signals from remote locations in a whole-home entertainment network back to your home theater. You need this wired system as a way to control remote devices when you're watching (or listening to) them in a different part of the house.

The amount of power needed for your home-theater receiver depends, in part, on the speakers you choose. Given a certain amount of power, different speakers have different sensitivities, a measure of how loud they are. The standard measure for speakers' sensitivity is how many decibels the speakers produce with 1 watt of power at 1 meter’s distance from the speaker.

Hooking up speakers is prettyeasy after you've carefully positioned the speakers in your surround-sound home theater. To hook up speakers, you just connect the speaker wires to the appropriate outlets on the A/V receiver. Before you plug and play, though, there are a few points to remember. Keep your speakers in phase.