Breaking in a new apartment or house? Perhaps you just need an update to your system? It’s all too easy to load up a cart with all the trappings necessary for a solid home theater setup — a receiver, a subwoofer, satellite speakers, the works — then realize you’re looking at a $1,000-plus investment.
Enter Pioneer’s $400 home theater-in-a-box (HTIB), which includes everything you need to bolster your cinematic audio experience. It can be a task to get everything working properly, though (especially if you don’t have much experience in the field), which is why we put together a quick Pioneer HTP-074
What’s in the box?
There is a lot of stuff to unpack here. Altogether, you get:
- A 100-watt subwoofer
- A 5.1-channel A/V receiver, rated at 100 W/channel
- A remote w/ batteries
- AM and FM antennae
- Four identical satellite speakers
- A center channel speaker
- Speaker wire to connect everything
- Mounts and screws for the satellite speakers
You won’t get any extra cables bundled in, HDMI or otherwise, so be sure to pick some up if you need anything to connect your components to the receiver in this system.
Hardware setup
The cool thing about having a full HTIB setup is that you can route pretty much all your devices through the receiver. Four HDMI-in ports should do the trick for game consoles, streaming devices, HD cable boxes, Blu-ray players, and the like. There are two composite inputs for non-HD devices, along with coaxial, optical, antenna, and analog audio. A single, HDMI ARC output is where you will connect to your television.
We recommend wiring and placing the speakers one by one, so you never get confused — it’s a lot of wiring, after all. To connect the speakers, unlock the bindings and feed the exposed ends of each wire into the corresponding binding (they are color-coded, so red goes to red, and white to black). Then, take the other end of the wire and do the same, feeding into the receiver.
In terms of placement, you will want to place the center channel directly above or below your television, with the four satellite speakers arranged in a sort of trapezoid. See the above diagram.
Features and design
The remote has basically every function you could want, including input selection, Bluetooth audio control, and more. The speakers themselves are more function than flash, in all black. The HTP-074 does support 4K passthrough and can faithfully reproduce high dynamic range (HDR) signals.
Software setup
To adjust settings, hit the “Home/Menu” button on your remote, which should bring up a black screen with some different options. Select “Manual SP Setup,” then head to “Speaker distance.” You will want to measure the distance between each speaker and your listening location — i.e. the center of your couch — and enter the appropriate values.
Next, go back to “Manual SP Setup,” and select “Channel Levels.” It will walk you through calibration so your speakers’ volume is properly balanced. To help with this process, try downloading a free db meter app on your smartphone to measure accurately and get all channels outputting the same level. You may want to adjust the center channel and surround speaker volume to suit your tastes, but going through this process will get you to a baseline from which you can make slight adjustments.
Finally, you will want to enable HDMI ARC, if that is how you are connected. Head back to the Home menu, then select “HDMI Setup” and enable ARC. Make sure ARC and HDMI-CEC are turned on in your TV as well.
We hope you have found this Pioneer HTP-074 HTIB unboxing and setup guide helpful. Happy listening!
