Home Theaters

    I often think back to the days when I would consider any channels of information beyond two (well, actually, in today’s parlance, 2.1) a ridiculous idea.

    I can’t tell you the number of different snide comments that used to be thrown around at meetings of audiophiles. “Humans have two ears not five (or seven)”, is one of the most innocuous things used to deride multi-channel advocates.

    Today, I understand why most need three extra channels of information. First, that’s the way things get encoded. More importantly, most people don’t possess the quality system capable of resolving the spatial information from 2 or 3 speakers properly, so the extra help is needed. In some cases, it is simple a matter of duplicating the number of microphones used in the original recording.

    In any case, I do still rail (slightly) at the need for 7 speakers (fullrange) versus 5. Most people don’t have a room with such depth that a second pair of speakers (rear) are needed. Note that I said rear. Most people believe that the ’surround’  speakers should be placed behind the listener/viewer. I have always believed, partly from my small delving into psychoacoustic theory, and partly from experimentation, that the speakers usually placed at the corners of the room behind the listener/viewer were not doing the best job possible. While on one hand, the low frequency reinforcement effects provide a boost with corner placement, the midrange keys to spatial placement are all off when placed behind the listening position.

    Another clue to proper placement is the staggered placement of several pairs of side speakers in large theaters, with their staggered time delays. Obviously, Dolby Labs believes that side placement is key, and rear speaker position, and output is downplayed greatly.

    I had never seen any written evidence of what was being used, as if nothing was purposely written so that most could simply put speakers at sides or rear, and happily listen in whatever way they deemed best. No grand theories, no major arguments.

    While moving through the web tonight, I came upon an answer by Alan Lofft, about speaker placement.  Mr. Lofft works for Axiom Audio, and his ideas almost completely agree with mine. (It’s good to know I’m in such good company!)

Here is a little of his thought process on speaker placement: 

I always suggest locating the two main left and right surround speakers in a standard 5.1-channel home theater setup to each side of the listening area (and a bit behind) rather than at the “rear” or “back.” In fact, when the subject arises, some may find my advice borders on the militant, especially when innocent emailers or callers ask me if they can use in-ceiling speakers as surrounds. With a deep sigh of frustration, I usually respond, “Well, if you absolutely must, and there is no other alternative, but please consider using well-designed speakers at the sides, with stands or brackets if necessary. Ceiling speakers are for airport and subway public-address systems, not for high-fidelity multichannel music and soundtrack reproduction.”

For years conventional wisdom, even in retail shops, incorrectly referred to surround speakers as “rears,” in part because lots of audio shop owners recalled the brief era of Quadraphonic four-channel sound in the 1970s, which specified placing four speakers in the four corners of the room. Besides, “surrounds” is a less specific term than “rears,” and “sides” just doesn’t cut it. As often as not, the back wall is where surround speakers often end up.

The fundamental reason for side placement of surround speakers, aside from the fact that Dolby Labs advise it, is that the 5.1-channel soundtracks for movies are mixed with the surround speakers above ear level at each side of the mixing theater or studio, just like in large movie theaters. Since in our home theaters or media rooms we are trying to replicate or mimic the acoustic soundfield that we experience in a cinema, and hear what the sound engineers and the director heard when they panned and mixed the directional effects for motion pictures, it’s clear enough that surround speakers properly belong on each side wall of your home theater, above ear level.

Interestingly, however, there are solid acoustical reasons for this (and psycho-acoustical data to support it). Our ears are at each side of our head, not on top or at the back, and the pinna-the shell-like cartilage external ear-is focused forward, the better to collect lateral reflections from the sides and direct sounds arriving from the front. The brain measures the timing and amplitude differences in the sounds arriving at the left and right ears and determines the direction and location of the sound source. Any sound other than front dead center has to travel farther around your head to arrive at the other ear, so it arrives a few milliseconds later.

What’s more, it turns out that our hearing is especially sensitive to these lateral timing and amplitude (signal strength) differences. In fact, research on concert-hall design has shown that it is largely the lateral-arriving sounds reflected from the sides of a space that tell our brain how big a space we are in. While sounds reflected from above and the back wall aren’t entirely wasted and do contribute, it is the arrival time and amplitude differences of the side-wall reflections that are crucial elements in giving us a sense of the acoustic space, its size, and reverberant character.

Some of this research came to light in the 1960s when orchestras and their governing boards pressured architects and acousticians to increase the size of concert halls by pushing out the sides of the hall in a fan shape, the better to accommodate more seats, wider aisles, generate more money, and bolster the salaries and retirement funds of the musicians. Sadly, the resulting halls turned into acoustic nightmares. Regular concertgoers, deprived of those important lateral reflections (the fan shape prevents side-wall reflections from reaching concertgoers’ ears) found the acoustics of these new, bigger, fan-shaped spaces “dry” or “dead,” “2-dimensional” or worse. Attendance declined and in the case of many big-city orchestras (Toronto, New York, San Francisco), entire halls were eventually gutted and re-built, with great attention paid to retaining the classic rectangular shoebox shape or some variation thereof. In most cases, the result was greatly improved acoustics and satisfied patrons.

The lesson in all this is to try and locate your surround speakers at the sides of the listening area, somewhere within that magic angle of from 90 to 110 degrees (to the front speakers) firing across the room and a bit above your ear level, if possible. With Dolby Digital 5.1-channel movie soundtracks of all varieties, and even with lots of multichannel music or CD material processed through Dolby Pro LogicII(x), you’ll experience the optimal mix of direct and reflected ambient sound. And, as many system owners have noted, the generous dispersion of Axiom’s quadpolar multi-directional QS8 and QS4 surrounds allow considerable leeway in placement.

    Aside from the fact that the author agrees with me, it is a good explanation of what many have heard, and believed, but did not express for some reason. I also have a very real prejudice against ceiling speakers, or any plate speaker for that matter. Speakers need to interact with the walls, not be a part of them.

    Wives simply have to be cajoled into the idea that speaker placement is a science, and that huge, albeit well placed speaker wires are a thing of beauty! (To those female audio/videophiles, my apologies, but in many years of sales, I never met one husband who was the stumbling block to getting an audio or home theater installation into a home.)