Whether you have spent in £100 or £10,000, sometimes, the best improvements you can make to your home cinema system can be the cheapest. Getting everything working to its potential is often a challenge, but there is a helping hand available…
The disc is split up into sections, and can be a little confusing to find you way around. The first part of the disc explains about the concept of home cinema and how to set your system up. It goes into quite a high level of detail, and talks about the equipment and how best to position it depending on the size and shape of your room. This can really help improve your system, and it is worth spending some time watching and experimenting with speaker and sub-woofer positions. Simply moving the sub-woofer out of a corner has often drastically improved the performance of many a system we’ve been asked to look at, and costs nothing. Even if you are happy with the position of your speakers and can’t/won’t/aren’t allowed to move them, have a play just to see if there are any improvements.
When you have found your way around the menus you are able to run through all sorts of audio and video tests to help optimise your equipment and set up. These range from the basic to the advanced, and whilst not everyone will use all of them, there are certainly some very useful checks and tests no matter what your system. We particularly ‘rattle’ test which simply sends out a sweep of high volume sound, from low to high frequency, to try and make items in your room rattle from the sound waves! It sounds daft but we sorted out an annoying problem on our system which we had overlooked just by blu-tacking down a loose grille!
What to consider before you Buy Digital Video Essentials
If you already have a testing DVD such as ‘The Ultimate DVD Platinum’ you will find some of the tests replicated on Digital Video Essentials. The menus can also be a bit confusing to use, but you get used to their quirkiness!
Why you should Buy Digital Video Essentials
If you have just purchased some an all-in-one system, or even a high end separates system, this disc can help you get the best out of what you’ve got. It costs less than a decent HDMI cable, and as a way of improving your home cinema system, never under estimate the little things! As a way of testing, checking and fine tuning your system, Digital Video Essentials is an essential purchase.