Am I Crazy for Wanting Someone Else to Tune My Home Theater?
When you’ve been involved in a profession or a hobby for a long time, you can start to take for granted the knowledge you’ve gleaned. You’ve probably experienced this. Electricians astonished that someone would be nervous about working on a light switch. Plumbers amazed that replacing a fill valve might intimidate someone. It is the same in home theater. Enthusiasts and professionals feel that setting up a TV and speaker system is fairly easy and routine. But to the uninitiated, it seems to be an insurmountable task. People often wonder if they should get someone else to set up and tune their home theater system. Let’s discuss!
It Is Normal To Want Help
As a middle-aged man, I’m not embarrassed to admit that I often call my more knowledgeable friends when undertaking a task for the first time. It just feels right to run my admittedly novice ideas and plans past someone who knows what they are doing. If possible, I’d love to have someone right there with me to correct me if I start to go wrong. The amount of money and time I could save by having an experienced friend nearby can’t usually be easily quantified.
But we don’t always have access to such friends. If you want someone to help you set up and tune your home theater, where do you go?
The Internet
Places like Reddit and online forums are filled with people doing looking for help on all sorts of things. They often have a plan but they aren’t sure it is “right.” They are looking for some sort of validation that they haven’t misunderstood the small amount of information they’ve consumed.
Unfortunately, the Internet is filled with people who love to make others feel bad. They latch onto best practices and claim any deviation is “wrong.” They’ll insist that your TV is too high, your center is too low, or that your speakers must be placed symmetrically. Are there good sources of help out there? Of course. But it is far more common that you’ll end up with advice that leaves you more stressed and confused than you were before.
Professionals
We are assuming throughout this article that you don’t have a friend or family member that you can turn to for help setting up and tuning your home theater. Or maybe you do but you’d rather pull your teeth from your head than spend any time with them (we get it, we’ve got family like that too). This leaves only one real alternative: Hire a professional.
Sometimes looking to a professional can feel like an admission of failure. You feel like you should be able to do this “simple” task yourself. Sure, you can view it this way. Or, and hear us out, this isn’t a failure. This is you admitting that your time is more valuable to you than learning how to set up and tune a home theater the one time in your life you’ll ever do it!
Can you change the oil in your car or fix the brakes on your kid’s bike or paint your house? Sure! These aren’t particularly hard tasks. Buy we’d be willing to bet you pay others to do at least one of these. They have the right tools, can do it better and faster, and, honestly, you just don’t like doing that particular task. So you pay someone else to do the tasks because the cost seems worth it to you.
Hiring a professional can be expensive, but they have all the right knowledge and tools, the experience, and the willingness to do the job. As we’ve said before, how is that a waste of money?
Take Away
No one should be made to feel bad for admitting they need help. Tunning and setting up a home theater may be relatively easy for some people, but it does take a lot of time to learn how to do it properly. Even with a lot of work, you can still make mistakes. Home theater is a hobby like any other. If you are interested in learning more, you can. But you shouldn’t have to in order to have a well set up system. Ask online for help but don’t be afraid to hire a professional.
