Who needs wires, right?
Especially when it comes to playing music or video sounds in your living room. Being tethered to your beefiest speaker setup across the room by a long, tangly audio cable can turn your spacious home dance floor or movie viewing area into a jump rope course.
Kidding. Please don’t use your audio cable as a jump rope.
Playing your favorite sounds through those larger home theater speakers can bring you in to the full experience of your media. And connecting those beats wirelessly makes being the DJ of the house from your couch that much more comfortable.
So if you are wondering how to connect your device to your home theater bluetooth, let’s dive in to the steps below that will bring you to true wireless freedom.
Determine If Your Home Theater Has Bluetooth
Newer home theater AV (audio/visual) systems have bluetooth modules either built in to them or as a special receiver that is already included.
If your system did not come with bluetooth capability, or is an older unit altogether, you can still connect your device wirelessly to your home theater with a bluetooth adapter.
Bluetooth adapters connect by a wire, either through HDMI, digital optical, or standard audio jack, to your home theater’s AV system to produce a wireless signal that can be captured by your newer devices.
The Harmon Kardon BTA Bluetooth Adapter is one of the most affordable and smallest home theater wireless modules sold on Amazon. It connects via a 1/8 inch mini phone jack or stereo RCA input to your home theater system to deliver a wireless bluetooth range of 50 feet to up to 8 simultaneous devices.
Say goodbye to annoying bluetooth connects and disconnects when playing music between your friends’ phones.
Once your home theater can accept bluetooth signal, it is time to discover and pair your devices to the AV system.
Discover The Bluetooth Signal From Your Home Theater
Home theater systems that have Bluetooth already built in will usually have a pairing button that activates the discovery mode for devices.
If your home theater system didn’t have the Bluetooth capability and you installed a bluetooth adapter, press the pair button associated with the adapter. On the Harmon Kardon adapter there is a light that flashes when in discover mode.
If a device is already connected to your home theater via Bluetooth and you are not able to also connect another device to the system, simply disconnect that device in the bluetooth settings or tap “forget this device” on iPhones and iPads to fully disconnect from the home theater bluetooth.
Once that device disconnects from the bluetooth, your home theater’s Bluetooth signal should show up as discoverable.
Open the Bluetooth menu from your device settings and, if needed, tap on the item that is labeled around discovering a new device.
Look for either the model name of your home theater, if Bluetooth was included out of the box, or the model name of the Bluetooth adapter that is wired to the AV system to see if it is discoverable.
Pair Your Device To Your Home Theater Bluetooth
When the model name of either your home theater system or adapter shows up in the Bluetooth discovery settings, tap the name to pair your device to the signal.
Sometimes your device will prompt for a PIN code to be added before your device can be successfully paired with your home theater system.
If that is the case, look up the PIN code for your home theater’s bluetooth or for the adapter and type the code into the device prompt.
Once the correct code is inserted, your device should be successfully paired to your home theater system.
Find Clever Ways To Connect Your Home Theater System Wirelessly
If you are reading this article because you want to eliminate wire clutter from your home theater system setup, there are also other ways you can go wireless further than just from your favorite device to your home theater.
Especially when it comes to tight, cramped spaces with a lot of footpaths, speaker wires can be the bane of a great sounding home theater system.
For surround sound home theater applications, the toughest part about usually boils down to installing and connecting the rear surround speakers to the central AV system up front.
Since banana speaker cables are usually thicker in gauge size, these can create unsightly clutter that streams across the living room or basement.
One of the best ways to produce a clean listening space for your home theater system is through a wireless speaker module.
The Rocketfish Wireless Home Theater Rear Speaker Kit on Amazon is a neat wire-free application that connects your rear surround speakers to your front ones.
Similar to a Bluetooth adapter, this rear speaker kit is hard wired to the AV system and delivers a wireless signal to the wired module in the back.
So even if you have an older home theater system with the red and black banana cables, you can hook your rear speakers up to this wireless unit so that there are no wires running from back to front.
There may be a slight audio delay between the front and rear speakers once the Rocketfish unit is installed, but many home theater systems have a setting adjustment to offset the delay between the front speakers and back speakers so that the audio matches up.
If your existing speaker cables limited you from moving your rear speakers back more, having a rear wireless unit can allow you to move the surrounds all the way to the back of the room.
Creating more space in your home theater set up gives a bigger, more robust surround sound feel that improves not just movie sound quality, but also music in general.
And The Best Applications To Use Bluetooth With Your Home Stereo System
Believe it or not, wires are becoming a thing of the past.
Especially when it comes to connected modern devices to external speakers. The use of wires is becoming a non-preferred method of sound delivery, or impossible to use with wires at all.
For instance, newer iPhones have eliminated headphone jacks, so in order to connect one of these devices to a stereo jack setup requires the use of an adapter that connects to lightning port.
So in essence, if you are throwing a party at home and you can’t find the adapter to hook up a newer iPhone to the home theater system, then it’s impossible by using just a standard audio cable.
Longer rooms that have more expansive home stereo system setups will benefit from Bluetooth connectivity because there is no need to trace an audio wire from your couch or table, where your device is, all the way to the AV system.
Even worse, if you never had a long enough audio cable to connect your devices to your home theater, then you had to leave your device with the AV system, which requires going up to the home theater system, where your device sits, every time you want to change the track on a song.
Bluetooth connectivity to your home theater allows you to watch movies on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop with the added power of big speaker sound. This is especially useful for gadgets that have speakers that are not working correctly, have crackled or muffled sound, or are too small for your group to hear around the room.