A good home cinema is mostly about two things people do not spend money on: where the seat is, and how the room sounds. The television usually matters less than the amount spent on it suggests.
Screen size is a distance calculation
The most common mistake is buying a screen too small for the room, which is the opposite of what people fear.
For 4K content, a reasonable rule is that the diagonal should be roughly two thirds of your viewing distance. Sitting three metres away suggests a screen around two metres diagonal, which is far larger than most people install.
The old advice to sit much further back came from lower-resolution sources, where you needed distance to hide the pixel structure. At 4K you can sit considerably closer before that becomes visible, and closer seating is what produces the immersive feeling cinemas have.
Measure the distance from the sofa before choosing a size, rather than choosing a size and hoping.
Height matters as much as size
Televisions mounted above fireplaces look tidy and are uncomfortable to watch. Your neck is extended for the whole film, and most panels lose contrast and colour accuracy when viewed from below.
The centre of the screen should be at roughly eye level when seated. That is lower than instinct suggests, usually about a metre from the floor.
Sound is where the upgrade actually is
Flat panels have no room inside for speakers that can move air, so the audio comes from small drivers usually firing downwards or backwards. This is why dialogue is hard to follow while explosions are deafening.
Almost any external sound system is a larger improvement than a better television. In rough order of value:
- A soundbar fixes the worst of it for modest money and one cable.
- A soundbar with a separate subwoofer adds the low end that makes films feel physical.
- A proper 5.1 system with real rear speakers, if the room and the household allow it.
If dialogue is the specific complaint, look for a centre channel or a dedicated dialogue enhancement setting. Speech lives in the centre channel, and a soundbar without one handles it poorly.
Connect it correctly
Use the HDMI port marked eARC on both television and sound system. It carries the full uncompressed audio formats, where optical cables and older ARC do not.
Plug source devices into the television and let it pass audio back over eARC, or run sources into the sound system if it has enough inputs. Either works; mixing the two approaches is what produces the situation where one input has no sound.
Cheap HDMI cables are generally fine at short lengths. Beyond about five metres, buy certified ones, because failures at high bandwidth show up as intermittent blackouts rather than a gradual decline.
Turn off the settings the shop turned on
Televisions ship in a mode designed to look bright under showroom lighting, and it is wrong for a living room.
Switch the picture mode to Cinema, Movie or Filmmaker. It will look warmer and dimmer at first, and after a few minutes it will look correct, because it is closer to how the film was graded.
Then turn off motion smoothing, variously called motion interpolation or given a brand name. It invents frames between real ones and produces the flat video look people describe as the soap opera effect. It is the single most disliked default in television.
Turn off dynamic contrast and noise reduction too. Both discard detail that was deliberately in the image.
Control the light
Contrast is what makes an image look good, and ambient light destroys it. Blackout curtains cost less than a screen upgrade and do more.
A dim light behind the screen, rather than total darkness, reduces eye strain without washing out the picture. Avoid lamps positioned where they reflect off the panel, which on a glossy screen means most places.
Soft furnishings help here as well as with sound. A room with a rug and curtains both looks and sounds better than a hard, bare one.
If dialogue is still hard to follow after the speakers are sorted, our piece on how subtitles are made explains why so many people now leave them on.
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