Why use Home Theater Installers

When considering having your equipment installed, one common idea is just to get your electrician or contractor to install it or to just do it yourself.  Formerly from the retail world, I’ve heard this a hundred times and every time, the explanation as to why to avoid this gets overlooked.  Before you get blinded by the idea of a cheaper price or the cost efficiency of “winging it yourself”, think a little further in.

When faced with the choice of either a team of professionals who know the ins and outs of the products they are installing or someone who knows how to put screws in a wall and mount something up, without even considering price, who would you choose?  Of course you would choose the people who know what they are doing based solely on those facts alone.  Now, allow me to throw two curve balls at the topic. 

The first curve ball is, of course, the price.  The home theater installers give you a price of, let’s say, $600 to mount your TV and run the speaker lines and mount your new surround sound.  You talk to your contractor or electrician and they say they’ll do it for $400.  Obviously, the installers are at a disadvantage with price.  Most people simply stop there and chose.  Here is why you shouldn’t. 

Now the second curve ball is product knowledge.  What does the job actually entail?  The first one being that they are mounting up an internet ready TV and setting up your surround sound receiver.  To put it bluntly, you do not need to be a rocket scientist to plug stuff in.  Red to red and green to green and this looks like it would be plugged into here and viola, its hooked up! That is usually what you would get with the electrician or the contractor assuming they do not have a fundamental understanding of how to efficiently set this equipment up.  Do they understand the differences in frame enhancer modes?  Do they know how to connect your TV or blu ray player to your wireless network for streaming?  Or tougher, do they understand how to setup an AV receiver?  Do they know the differences between Bitstream and PCM?  How to assign secondary amps?  Do they understand how to assign video up-scaling for specific inputs?  It may sound like I’m wording those in the most complicated ways, but when you look into the submenus, those exact words are what you see.

To be completely honest about it, these are things that people, such as myself, know like the back of our hands.  Why?  It is our jobs to know it.  I am pretty sure that I could somehow figure out how to run and electrical line or put up studs and dry wall, but I will not pretend to know how to do it quick and efficiently without reading a manual.  I would admit that I may not be the right guy for the job and recommend you to someone like your contractor or electrician.  That is what they do and what they know.  Home theater equipment is what WE know and what WE do.

Your contractor or electrician may be very well versed and skilled in their profession and definitely has a lot of knowledge in their trade.  Just be aware that the knowledge may not always translate over into the home theater world.  The man skilled with running electrical through your home may not know the right ways to get your home theater running the right way.  They both deal with electricity but are vastly different.  The man skilled with building may be able to mount your TV, plug it in and turn it on, but will it be set up the correct way for your family’s needs?  Every part of the reason you chose that TV will not magically be turned “on” or to the correct setting when the set is powered on.

As a consumer, it is your prerogative to make your buying decision based on value.  Value is an equal amount of price AND performance.  If you buy the cheapest car, do not expect power this and leather that and performance this.  Don’t be foolish and try to convince yourself that don’t need certain things solely because they cost more.  After all, when you purchase the home theater you and your family have been waiting for, getting the right people to hook it up and set it up will mean the difference between you getting a fraction of the experience or the full performance that you paid for.  As my grandfather once told me; Pay a little more now or pay a lot later.