I’m glad to see this topic come up again.
I thought of your post about using double surrounds along the wall when I was reading this and wondered if you’d tried using the wide channel as the “second” surround channel.
If you read Audyssey’s information, they want you to place height speakers at 45 deg to the listening position and pointed directly to the center (prime) listening position. This tells me that they prefer a directional speaker.
Good insight I hadn’t picked up on that.
I have always had a preference to DTS, so I’m hesitant to commit to any particular layout until I see what DTS comes out with.
I’ve also preferred DTS but very few of my movie DVD soundtracks have it. OTOH most of my concert and music DVS do have DTS. Though I’m starting to see more of it now that I’ve got a Blu-ray player.
If you don’t care if wires are strung about and visible, a person could experiment and find a solution that works best for their room or their personal preference.
I’m planning on doing exactly that as I’ve already got wires running all over the floor trying out different 7.1 speaker positions. I will pull my QS8s from the back and try both QS8s and M22s in both the height and wide positions. I’m already suspecting that for my room (seating is very wide compared to room width while far away from the front) that the QS8s will work best as wide speakers and the M22s as height speakers.
All my wiring will be on the outside of the wall hidden by curtain rods and curtains so even after I find the layout I like, tweaking will still be an option. If I had a small separate amp I could even set up my VP150 as a single back speaker.
One pain is that with more speakers it takes even longer for the receiver to ping all of them for the Audyssey setup routine. Unfortunately things are getting very busy at work and I might not have any time to experiment until the Thanksgiving Holiday.
So now I'm in the market for a reciever that will bring me up to date, but now I'm nervous that as soon as I buy one, the powers that be are going to completely revolutionize speaker placement, as well as the software to run them. Making it hard to know if I should still hold off until all of this is settled, or go ahead and make the plunge now and 'damn the torpedos'!!! After all, they'll never have EVERYTHING settled and permanent. This is just the way things are in hi-fi audio.
I figure if I can get three years out of a receiver before the upgrade bug hit’s I’m doing good. Hopefully I can post some opinions soon on how the height and wide channels perform with QS8s and M22s in my setup. Well at least I get a military discount at Lowe’s and 2x2s are cheap so I can make some temporary speaker stands again. Didn’t I swear about a month ago I wasn’t going to buy a “modern” receiver and drag myself into this again.
Cheers,
Dean
