7.1 Side surround speaker placement question

dpowell

I'm installing in-ceiling side and rear surround speakers. I'm looking for advice on placement. The manual shows the side rear speakers directly to the side and slightly behind the listening location. My situation won't work for that configuration without moving the couch much closer to the screen. My current proposed config shy of cutting holes in drywall is to have the side surrounds about 3 feet in front and 4 feet off to the side of the listening position. I'm curious if anyone has experience with this?

kuntasensei

I did in-ceiling surrounds for a friend and it worked pretty well, but it was only 6.1. My side surrounds are actually slightly in front of my listening position because that ended up being the best position for front-to-back pans.

mufsoman

I had in-ceiling speakers for rears in a 7.1 set up for a short time and eventually took them out. I found them too directional (straight down) and since there's so little unique sound going to the rears in a 7.1 set up, I found there just wasn't enough sound that could be heard from the listening area to make it worthwhile. I like to "hear" my surrounds. My experience is that as you position the ceiling speakers further away from the listening position, you start to loose the capability to hear the small sound details. Even though some in-ceiling speakers have a small tilt built in, this is still doesn't help as you get further away.

My preference is also the have the surrounds slightly behind since the sound going to the these speakers are usually tied to action in the movie coming from behind the viewer. I had surrounds slightly in front of the listening position once too, and didn't like the effect. Just my 2 cents....

cheddar

I also had side surround speakers slightly forward of the listening position in a 7.1 system and didn't like it. I thought the surround back speakers would balance the side surrounds out some and still give directionality to sounds that are supposed to come from behind. But the back surrounds are used so little even when matrixed in that the side surrounds still pushed the surround sounds too far forward.

It may be better to have a 5.1 system with properly positioned rear surrounds than a 7.1 system with the side surrounds too far in front.

B Run

cheddar wrote: »

It may be better to have a 5.1 system with properly positioned rear surrounds than a 7.1 system with the side surrounds too far in front.

+1 on that, but everyone has their own preference.

vik_tx

I am a little confused after reading these posts.. which speakers carry more sound in a 7.1 configuration.. the sides or the rears? I always assumed it to be the rears, but pls let me know if this is not the case.

kuntasensei

vik_tx wrote: »

I am a little confused after reading these posts.. which speakers carry more sound in a 7.1 configuration.. the sides or the rears? I always assumed it to be the rears, but pls let me know if this is not the case.

If you have them calibrated properly, the 4 surrounds get pretty much the same amount of sound. Anything not hard right or hard left gets panned across the rear soundstage to some degree. The bigger question is whether your room can support proper placement for this panning to work the way it is designed to. If you can't do a proper 7.1 setup, 5.1 will actually give you a better result.

dpowell

The room will allow for proper 7.1 setup as long as I know what that is. I guess I'll do some more research to find out what proper spec is for 7.1. I was kind of afraid that having them too much in front would be problematic.

I found this setup on Dolby's website:

http://www.dolby.com/consumer/setup/speaker-setup-guide/index.html

cheddar

The dolby setup is pretty standard. If you look at the angles, 90-110 degrees would put the side speakers either directly to the side of the listening position or slightly behind. This is consistent with the recommendation not to put the speakers too far in front. You may not mind the loss in accuracy as much as others, suppose it depends on if you can somehow test out the positions of the speakers before you mount them, only way to know for sure.