Home theater is a rapidly growing segment of the home entertainment field. The term is often used, but you may not really know what it means. Don't feel bad as there are plenty of terms and acronyms used in the electronics field that you won't find anywhere else, and the technical afficianados are the only ones who seem to be able to keep it all stratight, and sometimes it's a challenge for them as well.

Basically, a home theater is created when you upgrade the audio and video components of your television set to the point where it enhances the viewing experience beyond it's current capacities. In other words, when you buy a TV set it already has a means of displaying images and producing sound built right into it. And although those sound and video elements are much improved over TV sets from yesteryaer, they still leave much to be desired when compared with, for instance, movie theater entertainment. But that is all changing.

You can upgrade the video portion of the television by getting a HDTV that has a large screen that displays in widescreen format. HDTV widescreen more closely resembles the viewing format used in movie theaters, and more and more media and broadcasts will be shown in widescreen, so if you don't have it, you could be missing a lot of the action in the film or broadcast that you should be seeing. Whether you choose an LCD or plasma screen for your HDTV is a personal choice and depnds on several factors, but either will produce beautifully rich colors that you can't help but enjoy as you watch.

The next part to focus on is the audio. You can go as wild or as conservative as you wish here. A basic system is one with an audio amplifier hooked up to the audio aoutput of the TV that amplifies and enriches the sound and delivers it to speakers outside the TV. You will notice an improvement in the sound with even the most basic of audio enhancements. However, if you really want to take it up a notch, you can get amplifier/receivers that can take full advantage of the HDTV Dolby surround sound feature and deliver that sound to speakers that can reproduce the whole audio spectrunm, from the thundering lows of subwoofers to the highs of tweeters.

The choice is yours to make on how far you take your home theater experience, and much will probably depend on your budget. At the high end, the viewing experience rivals that of a movie theater. At the lower end, you still get a lot better sound and picture than what you have with the TV alone. And there is plenty of middle ground to let you emphasize the components that are most important to you.