I love my home theater, but it definitely came with its share of issues when I finally came around to putting it together. I started with a stereo setup and slowly added to it, with the intention of having Dolby Atmos in the end. As you might’ve guessed, speakers were my biggest priority, and that’s not the right mindset to have.

Having the necessary speakers for Atmos is nice and all, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have a proper receiver to pair with them. Dolby Atmos isn’t available on every receiver, so the first thing you need to do is make sure that what you’re buying has the functionality. This is also a scenario where you’ll need at least a 7.1 receiver, as you can just reconfigure two of those speaker slots to work as Atmos in a 5.1.2 system.

I found out there’s a big difference between budget receivers and high-end ones as well. While you might think that all a receiver needs to do is power your speakers, there’s a bit more that they do. A good receiver comes with good room correction software and the ability to plug in all your devices. My living room receiver, a Denon 760H, isn’t the greatest in the world by any stretch, but it does what I need it to do. I spent a lot of time researching what I wanted, and that’s what I settled on. It’s important that you do the same.

Your receiver is the command center

You have to treat it as such

While all the sound will be coming out of your speakers, the receiver is what’s powering them. It’s easy to get carried away looking for the best speakers, and believe me, I get it. There are so many speakers out there, and you have to pick between bookshelves and floor-standing, and you also need to find a brand you like. From there, you need to find a matching center speaker, and things can get expensive in a hurry. I know a lot of people spend a lot of their research in this area, and that’s fine, but you need to make sure you find a solid receiver, too.

If your receiver fails, then the whole system falls apart. It’s easy to cut corners here, especially if you go with a home-theater-in-a-box that comes with a cheap receiver itself. There’s so much more that a receiver does aside from powering your speakers. My Denon comes with Audyssey, a program that adjusts my speakers and their volume to fit my viewing area. It’s a big lifesaver that saves me the trouble of having to tweak everything myself. It takes just a few minutes to do, and it’s well worth the time. Other receivers have better room correction software, and while I don’t have access to it myself, I read quite often about how the better software is worth the price of admission.

Buying something cheap that can fail quickly is a recipe for disaster. I would certainly recommend setting a few hundred dollars aside to make sure you get a quality receiver. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars, but you should get something from a reputable brand that has some quality reviews to back it up. If you’re getting something from a no-name brand from Amazon, chances are that you’re not going to enjoy your experience.

The good news is that there are plenty of reputable brands — Yamaha, Denon, Onkyo, and Marantz, just to name a few. The only thing you need to do from there is figure out what you want for your space and make a purchase.

Use your receiver’s features

It can do quite a bit

Apart from the room correction software, there’s still a lot that your receiver can do that you should take advantage of. The big thing for me is plugging it into your TV’s HDMI eARC slot so it can handle the audio for you. It’s frustrating that my Apple TV 4K doesn’t allow passthrough because there’s a world out there that’s more than just Dolby Atmos. My receiver can do DTS:X, Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus, and the list goes on. It’s nice that whatever audio format is thrown at it, it can handle it.

On top of that, you can plug in things like a record player into the Phono input or use AirPlay to listen to music. Your receiver can handle a lot, and I like to throw as much as I can at it because it guarantees I’m going to be getting the best audio I can get in my house. This is a major selling point of having a receiver, and I don’t see any reason not to use all your features if you have them. Another big one is having enough HDMI ports to plug in all your devices. For far too long, I had to unplug HDMI cables and move them around to plug things in, but that’s not an issue any longer.