Speaker Calibration

Before speaker calibration, What are 0.1s in 5.1, 7.1 or 9.1 surround sound? It is obvious that the number 5 represents loudspeakers and the reason to use 0.1 in 5.1 systems is simply for LFE (Low-Frequency Effects) channel which goes to a subwoofer and its sample rate is at 240Hz. There is usually no need to use LFE in most of the music production, but it could be used in post production for that dramatic low end effects are very important for example explosions or like in the conjuring project the earthquake scene.

To manually calibrate the surround sound system, first thing to do is putting all five speakers to the right place, three at the front and two at the back of the listener. It is arranged in such way that all are in equal distance, as seen in the diagram. Front left and right postponed at 30 degrees and rear left and right at 110 degrees from the listening position. Then comes calibrating speaker levels, in which one will need an SPL meter, set to C-weighting, Keeping the master volume at 0dB and then pink noise as your output from one speaker at a time, which allows us to adjust volume accordingly. The level of a subwoofer can be boosted around 2 to 3 dB also in the centre speaker according to ones preference for the clear dialogues.

Nowadays there are many auto calibration systems are trending where all this is done automatically, but there is no problem is doing it manually once in a while to double check the results. After all it is all about getting the perfect listening experience.

References

Denison, C. (2017). Home theater calibration guide: Manual speaker setup. Digital Trends.

Home theater automatic speaker calibration dos and don'ts. (2017). CNET.