What are some simple things you can do/buy to get the most out of your home theatre system?

Have your system calibrated properly video and audio, most people do not do this at all and get poor sound/video quality, it is something a experienced DIY can do, but frankly paying a installer $100 US will get you lots of performance for such a small price, make sure to not use a big box store for this.

Improve the interconnects. Having the right cable will make or break a system, use my 10% of total system cost rule.

Add power condtioning to your system, it will greatly increase the performance of a system if it has dirty power. Plus connected equipment warranty!!

Switch to DTS tracks to see if the sound is better.

Clean your equipment regularly. Exterior mostly, and clean VCR with wet tape method once a week, clean DVD every 6 months by a pro. Keep you speakers clean as well as you sub.

Run system a few hours a week to keep it running properly and avoid having to break in cables over and over again.

Wire managment. Keep power lines from signal lines, video from audio, speaker cable from everything else. Why make you cables work harder at rejecting unwanted signals if you don't have to.

Happy theatering. you can wall mount your satellite speakers, and you should make sure that your speakers are set at the same height.

most electronics sotres sell a THX optimizer disk, that you play in your dvd player, that help you adjust all of the levels on your system so that they perform just right get a power conditioner, thicker speaker wires shielded AV wires other wise replace the speakers with better ones and stay away from satellite speakers if you run larger speakers you can set the crossover at a lower frequency so that the sound rolls smoothly on to the sub if possible leave front 2 mains on full frequency with out the crossover it helps the bass sound better the absolute best thing that you can do is to calibrate your speakers, the first thing that you will need is a SPL meter-radioshack has a very cheap one ($30-50 US), then you sit in the spot on the couch or wherever you watch usually watch tv at and go through the reciver menu (all brands are different so the best thing that you can do is to look it up your manual) and adjust it so that all the speakers are the same volume on the meter(usually i set the sub about 10-13 db higher than the rest of the speakers), and thats is all there is to it. "Yay, it's me"...There are a lot of things that don't cost a penny to make your Home Theater sound and look better.