Music fans young and old have been brought together in grief by the news of the tragic death of one of the most iconic figures in music history. With a career that spans nearly 40 years, all of our record collections include tracks by, or at the very least inspired by the unrivalled King of Pop – Michael Jackson.

Signed to Berry Gordy’s Motown Records aged only 11 years old & the fronting face of The Jackson 5 – their first hit I’ll Be There was released in 1969 and since then he has been one of the most instantly recognisable sounds in the industry.

His solo career launched a fresh & different sound to his music & his 1979 record Off the Wall is arguably his greatest album, with legendary tracks like ‘Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough’ the inspiration behind the careers of this generation’s pop greats like Usher & Justin Timberlake.

Michael Jackson was a master of transformation - reinventing himself yet again for the 1982 album Thriller, this time with a bigger, edgier sound & collaborating with rock legend Eddie Van Halen on Beat It. Almost every single track on the album was a huge hit & the record sold millions, more than any before it and more than 25 years later no album has sold more since.

Albums such as Bad & Dangerous followed, but unfortunately as time went on, his personal battles grappled the limelight from his musical talent.

Not only reknowned worldwide for his music – Michael Jackson was a pioneering figure in the use of music video. His 14 minute long mini-movie for Thriller has been named the greatest music video ever made & also the most expensive production of its time, costing half a million US dollars to make.

Michael’s highly-anticipated comeback tour sold out after only minutes of being on sale earlier this year & the sense of loss felt by many fans will be further tinged by the fact that they were only days away from seeing their hero perform live, for many of them for the first time in their lives.

Although Michael Jackson’s life & career has been cut tragically short - his legendary sound has inspired many of today’s performers, like R Kelly, Estelle, P Diddy, Madonna, Fall out Boy & The Black Eyed Peas. In the words of The Bee-Gees’ Robin Gibb: “He had a great voice and millions of people yet to be born will sing his songs…One consolation is that he will triumph by his legacy.”

The thoughts of everybody at Atacama Audio are with Michael Jackson’s family.

When it comes to setting up electronics equipment, there is a certain art to the procedure that people in the know can practice with differing results, and there is a science as well that is necessary (and not easy, for some people) to understand in order to accomplish good results.  Knowing how to set up audio equipment is a good example: it is very common for people to buy speaker systems, take them home, and then have absolutely no clue how to properly arrange the speakers, connect them, and configure the most remotely complex audio system—no matter how many times over they read the manual.  Between understanding what the difference between a subwoofer and a tweeter is and comprehending what causes sound interference and what a crossover is, there is a lot to learn for the average person looking to properly configure their home speaker system.

There are a few things that need to be understood about speaker equipment for someone to be able to have the foggiest clue of where to put things and what is necessary.  First of all, if what you’re looking for is truly high fidelity sound with plenty of amplification capacity, you need to go with a 4-way system—and what does that mean?  Sound travels in waves, and in order to reproduce certain bands of frequencies (high, middle, and low) in high fidelity a speaker needs different drivers to do so, each driver specializing in reproducing a certain band of frequency levels.  Hence, a subwoofer is responsible for reproducing very low frequencies, a woofer low frequencies, a mid-range speaker middle frequencies, a tweeter high frequencies, and a supertweeter for extremely high frequencies.  Subwoofers have the largest dimensions (specifically the biggest diameter), and a supertweeter would have the smallest dimensions.  When a cabinet contains two such drivers, it is referred to as a 2-way speaker system.

It is possible to buy a cabinet (structure housing one or several drivers) that houses many if not all of these drivers, or it is possible for each of them to be stand alone units.  Having these different drivers spaced correctly from each other, and creating a rich sound environment in a room is basically the most important aspect of properly setting up a speaker system.  To make sure that your speakers are being used in the most ideal fashion, you need to have a crossover system in place, which is a device that divides the audio input into different frequency bands (which, as we will see, can be exactly configured in certain crossover systems) and routes each of these bands to the driver that is most ideally suited to reproduce that range of frequencies.  Any speaker system using more than one driver has a crossover, though these are usually passive crossovers, which do not require an additional power source and are relatively built-in to the units.  More complicated systems use active crossovers, which do require an external power source and are a often a separate unit: these active crossovers can achieve higher amplitudes (which can break certain drivers of inadequate size or poor construction materials), can be more precisely configured, and separate the audio input into separate frequency bands before amplification, not after as passive crossovers do.  Having an active crossover will allow you to be able to fine tune your system a lot more than a system with a passive crossover, though of course not using an active crossover properly would be worse than simply listening through a passive one…so be careful of what you choose, and be honest with yourself about how much you really are able to do!

Now comes the important part—knowing where to position things.  It is incredible how much frequency interference there can be inside a room, and the best way to avoid this is by having each speaker (or rather, each driver) positioned properly.  First, a few definitions: in the room you will be setting the speakers system up in, the back wall will be the term used for the wall behind the speakers, and the side walls obviously the ones to the left and right of you as you sit there listening.  The optimal set up will inevitably require a significant amount (aka time) of tweaking with the arrangements, the spacing and all, but will be achieved if you are patient enough.  To begin to have an idea of the relation the speakers should have with you in the listening position, imagine yourself and the two spots where you will put your main cabinets (ideally containing a 3- or 4-way speaker system) as the three points of an equilateral triangle.  Make the distance of one side of that imaginary triangle equal roughly six to eight feet.  Now, make sure that the speaker cabinets are positioned at equal distances from their nearest side wall, which is to say that when you look forward at your speakers playing in your direction, the space to the right of the speaker on the right is the same length as the space to the left of the left speaker.  Try to vary the distance between each main speaker cabinet and the back wall, with one of them two feet from the back wall and the other three or four feet from the back wall.  Angle the speakers slightly inwards (i.e. facing slightly in towards each other, not away from each other), more or less pointing at the center point of the room (or wherever it is that your most common listening position will be, like a couch, for example).  Maintaining these general guidelines, fidget with the precise values, changing them a bit every few days and comparing the listening experience between the different orientations.

Generally, try to make sure that tweeters are positioned higher up on shelves or mounted to the wall, and keep subwoofers and woofers lower down to the ground.  Nonetheless, try to keep cabinets elevated to roughly the height you will be in when listening to your system, with tweeters (assuming they are independent units, which they may not be) slightly above the height of your head.  A great way to ensure optimal set up is to invest in some high quality speaker stands.

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How many people have gone out and purchased incredibly cutting-edge electronics equipment (say, for their home theater system) at a very significant price, only to get home and have absolutely no clue as to which cables go where, what kinds of cables are needed, and how everything gets properly hooked up? Audio/video (AV) cables are one of the most common sources of consternation among the non-technologically savvy demographic of the population, which is a clear and overwhelming majority of people in the country, and throughout the world.

When dealing with AV cables, most people don’t have the slightest clue as to what the different colors mean, what the words on the back panels of the equipment stand for, and what the different jacks (both male and female; another area of confusion) are all about. The first and most important thing that anyone can do when trying to set up audio/video equipment is to READ THE MANUAL BEFOREHAND—there is no surer way to have a clue than to do so, period. Nonetheless, this article will seek to appease those obstinate souls that simply refuse to even break the plastic cover of the user’s manual, as well as supplement the knowledge of those that tried reading it, but could not absorb its super condensed and techie-sounding jargon.

The most common AV cable combination comes in the form of one single cable with three male jacks on either end—male jacks are the ones on a cable itself; female jacks are the ones on the back panel of the equipment, into which the male jack is inserted—each of which has a distinct color from the rest. The yellow jack is the video jack, and it carries video images alone. The white jack is the left audio (stereo audio systems are composed of two channels, left and right, unlike the single channel of mono audio systems) connection, and the red jack is the right audio connection. The two ends of such an AV cable (in reality three cables, two for audio and one for video, but that have been placed inside the same plastic insulation, effectively making them one for our purposes) are absolutely the same, and when connecting two separate devices (like a camcorder and a television) it does not matter which end of the cable you hook up to either apparatus. As long as you use one end for each device, and have placed the audio jacks where they belong and the video jack where it belongs (with no crossing over at all in this regard), then there is absolutely no difference in using one end or the other of the cable.

To fill out the color coding generally used for analog AV equipment, it is important to keep in mind that green represents the center audio channel, blue represents the left surround channel, gray represents the right surround channel, brown represents the left back surround channel, tan represents the right back surround channel, and purple represents the subwoofer channel.

The preceding descriptions are all applicable to analog audio and video cables; things get a little different when we’re talking about digital audio and video. Of course, digital technologies are booming and more homes and professionals are switching from analog to digital for their music, television, etc. Consequently, knowing which AV cables to use for your digital equipment is important. Color coding is used for digital jacks as well. With your digital audio cables, orange is used for the S/PDIF channel.

Digital video cables can come in a few different varieties, such as HDMI. You will want to use a high-quality digital video cable if you are connecting high-quality equipment like an HD TV to your high-def cable box or satellite decoder, but not to connect an old VCR to an old tube TV. You will only need high-quality AV cables if the content you are trying to play is also high-quality, and under no other circumstances. To try to capture this point with an allegory: if you bought yourself a $100,000 dollar top of the line sports car, would you want to outfit it with the cheapest possible tires? No, you wouldn’t!

Basically, you need to think of the fact that a good home audio/video system can’t be built using poor AV connections—and that’s what the cables are, they connect things. Poor quality cables can allow for serious issues with noise and interference in the signal coming from your source components, a situation which will have a significant and unpleasant effect on the quality of your viewing and listening experience. Cheap cables can often break or wear and tear easily in addition to providing a weak signal.

It is always important to measure the distances you need your cables to be and buy extensions of a similar if not exact distance; you can go down to an electronics store and the employees will be able to cut you an exact length of cable and add the jacks afterwards. If you are going to do an in-wall installation of your cables, then you will really want to make sure that the cables are of a higher quality. Though it is not demanded by law, it is a very good idea to only put UL-rated cables into your walls, as these have been tested and have proven to meet certain safety standards, which means you won’t need to be worrying about your home! Try going for nothing less than CL2 or CL3 cables for in-wall installation.

To recap, know that if you are working with cutting edge home electronics equipment, you need to make sure that your AV cables are high-quality; otherwise you will be failing to take advantage of the inherent benefits of your superior home entertainment technology. Always make sure that you have inserted the cables into the correct jacks and that you are obeying the color coding of these, when applicable (which will not necessarily always be the case). Remember that for the best final results, every link in your audio/video chain needs to be as good as possible!