Need Help With Surround Speaker Choice

mufsoman

I currently have fxi3 and Tc80i's for surrounds and backs in a 7.1 setup. I have not been too happy with the sound I'm getting. The Tc80i's are too directional and get lost in the rest of the sound field. They also seem to muddy the sound fron the surrounds. Due to my room design, the fxi3's need to be mounted too high directly over the sitting postions. Following the recommendation of a friend, I disconnected the backs and temporarily hung the Fxi3's at an angled down position. This substantially increased the detail of the surround tracks. Big improvement !!!!!

My thoughts now are to eliminate the 7.1 set up and just focus on 5.1. And to replace the Fxi3's and Tc80i's with either Fxi a6's or Rti a3's. With the room design, the dipole speakers don't seem to be doing much since there's so much space behind the HT area due to the bar, thus the thought on perhaps just using Rtia3's. Check out my room pics in the Showcase.

Any recommendations or confirmation of theories or similar experience to share??? Thanks

mufsoman

Any recommendations for surround choice with lots of open space behind the HT area and only one side wall?

kuntasensei

Good 7.1 requires very careful distance/delay settings to really work as it should. A lot of times, you can blend the rear surrounds in better by making a slight change from their actual physical distance.

Personally, because of the way dipoles work, I've never heard them work well in a 7.1 configuration because sounds placed between side and rear surround don't get the correct phase alignment (i.e. sounds don't image between them because the side surrounds have out-of-phase drivers to create a diffuse sound, whereas the goal of 7.1 is precise placement across the rear soundstage). Before you go rewiring things, change your FXi3s to bipole and do a careful calibration of distance/delay in your AVR to see what you think.

If that doesn't work out, then you may well just prefer a well-placed 5.1 setup.