Who has experimented with different heights for the rear surround speakers in a 5.1 system? I'm going to mount a small pair of satellite speakers for my rear surrounds and don't want to drill too many holes while I experiment.
My room is 11' by 15', with the tv against one of the long walls and the couch against the other. The tv and couch are almost centered, but not quite -- maybe 2' off-center. The ceiling height is about 9'.
The room will look better if I mount the surrounds very close to the ceiling. Has anyone done this? in this sort of setup? How did it work?
Good question, for best performance you would want them above ear level, as soundtracks are likely to be optimized for that location. Your best placement areas would be on the 11' wall which would be to your right and left side if you were sitting on the couch. Picture yourself sitting on your couch and make a 90 degree right angle from your ear. That is as close to the TV direction you would mount the speaker and about 110 degrees toward the corner of the wall is as far back as you would want to mount them. Having this placement setup for Dolby Digital would be the better than having them mounted above you or behind you.
And yes, you can mount them close to the ceiling but I strongly recomend using a mounting bracket that will allow you to pivot the speaker in the direction of where you will be seated.
Thanks a lot -- how much does it matter that the couch is off-center? If I mount them to the side walls near the ceiling, one speaker will be a few feet further away than the other. I could also mount them a few feet away on the wall behind me, but with a bracket so I point them towards the sofa.
Again, the best positioning would be to the sides. I would try listening to the surround setup with both rear speakers set at equal volumes first (because 2ft is not a great offcenter) then if you can tell one channel is louder than the other, experiment with your amplifier settings, you may set the further rear surround channel 1 level higher than the other.
This, with the surrounds slightly above ear level. As FEOT suggests, compensation for any different distance could be made via different volume settings for the rears. Also many AVRs have some sort of digital distance compensation configuration for all speakers in their surround setup procedure.
