I have a question about av recievers??

Question

What is the point in them. I havent exactly made my home theater yet. But Can i not just hook up my blueray player and surround sound directly to my projector itself??? What exactly does the av reciever bring/do to me??? As you can see i really dont know much about this kinda stuff!!! PLease HELP...explain!!!

Answer 1

You can hook up your bluray player to the projector directly but not your speakers.

Typically an AV receiver lets you hook up multiple audio/video devices and then run one video cable to your projector.  The AV receiver also decodes all the audio and has an amplifier in it where all the speakers would be hooked up.  You really do need one if you want to experience sound...

Answer 2

Your projector will not likely have connections for speakers.  A receiver will take the audio and video from a variety of sources (cable box, satellite, DVD, blue-ray, CD, etc) and allow you to chose between the sources conveniently while decoding the audio, amplifying, and sending the signal to your speakers.

While your projector may have an internal speaker, it will be lacking in power and quality, and is meant mainly for presentations in small conference rooms, not for surround sound.

You'll more than likely want your sound quality to match that of your picture quality.  While you probably don't need a top of the line receiver for this, you will still need one.

There are box kits (speakers included) which are probably sufficient for your needs, however, if you want to increase your sound quality, you can buy the individual components separately.

Answer 3

No, you cannot plug speakers into any device that does not have an audio *amplifier* in it. Your projector is very, very unlikely to have such in it.

What an AV receiver does is not only provide the audio power to put a signal to the speakers thats strong enough for the speakers to turn into actual sound coming out of the speakers.

Further, it acts to control all of the other gear in the system, so that you would plug the DVD player into the AV receiver, ditto the VCR, CD player, and so on. Then the AV receiver would send audio and video lines out to the TV, so that you end up doing your switching at the receiver and not at the TV.

This is good, because a lot of TVs don't have enough inputs to accept every input that you want to connect to it.

You can play a DVD/BluRay player directly to a TV or equivalent device, but not speakers.

Look up some sites on te Web about the basics of home theater and that'll give you some more details about all this.

The basic point is that speakers ALWAYS need amplification.