One question, how far is your seating going to be from your mains? As long as it’s not to far the I would use QS8s placed on the back wall as John suggested. Early Dolby placement diagrams and even my Denon 2807 suggest placing the surrounds as far back as 135 degrees to help create the “phantom” back effect John mentioned. I did this in my apartment and got the best most seamless surround field of any room I’ve been in.
OTOH if this will put a long distance between your mains and your surrounds the front to back panning might not work well. Really the best way to get your speakers set right is to experiment. Set them approximately where you want them and then play a 5 channel sweep with a demo disk or most computers with 5.1 also have the capability. Then move them around until you get the most seamless panning you can. If you can get a test tone to pan pretty well (doesn’t need to sound seamless test tones never will) then any program material will sound great. The most important thing I’ve found to creating a seamless 360 degree sound field is symmetry. The more symmetrical you can get things both in relation to your seating and to walls the better it gets.
With your seating so close to the back wall you might try something that worked well for me in a small room. I put furniture sliders under my futon so when I wasn’t watching or playing anything it was up against the back wall but I could easily slide it out to get about 3’ behind my seat to give more room for the back sound field to develop. It worked great.
As for timber in the panning I am very sensitive to it and have never noticed a problem with the QS8s matching my M22s or my M80s. The farther apart two speakers are the less noticeable timber differences become which is one reason many people are happy to use QS8s with other speaker brands.
Also, I’ve tired both QS8s and M22s as surrounds and the QS8s win, no contest.
Cheers,
Dean
