So... my brother in law is making progress on his HT-to-be and keeps coming up with really difficult questions. Here's the latest :
The HT area is one corner of a typical basement, sharing a ~13x30 area with a pool table (pool table is behind the sofa). The ceiling is relatively low, and there are even lower sections running front to back at both sides of the area which accomodate heating ducts etc..
Both of these sections come down about 8" from the ceiling, and there is "just" enough room under the lowered sections for us to walk underneath without an "impact headache". He's going for 7.1 but we're going to worry about the rears later -- right now the challenge is getting a plan in place for surrounds before the drywall goes up.
Rob is leaning towards relatively tall surrounds (eg. Paradigm ADP370) which are about 13" tall, so the speakers would either need to hang down below the 8" dropped section (bang, ouch) or extend up into the ceiling by building a recessed box area up between the joists with angled sides to minimize echoes. I have a couple of concerns with this -- first that the recessed area will make for a "boxy" resonance, and second that the tweeters will be up in that area and won't radiate properly. Turning the surrounds upside down will get the tweeters out of the recessed area but will put the woofers up in the recess making the boxy resonance worse (I figure the recess will be ~12x12 so resonance around 560 Hz).
When he called Axiom he was told that the top speaker in a QS surround needed to be several inches away from the ceiling, so he isn't looking hard at Axioms right now. The Paradigms have two surfaces with speakers, angling left and right, each with a woofer and tweeter, which would be fine if the speakers weren't so tall.
My first thought was QS4s on FMBs, angling down slightly so the top woofer would be ~3" away from the ceiling and the bottom of the QS would poke perhaps an inch below the dropped section of the ceiling. I think that would work OK but Rob really wants to go for larger surrounds (eg. QS8 etc..). I *think* the QS4s would be OK in his system even at reasonably high volumes because the surrounds are close to the listening position (surrounds would be a couple of feet from each side of the sofa), can anyone comment ?
Because the HT area only occupies one corner of the basement there is a wall on one side but not the other. All we have on one side is a post in roughly the right position.
I guess one possibility would be to add another side wall then just mount the QSs on side walls but I *think* there was some reason Rob didn't want to do that. I will ask again since that would be an easy solution.
The other possibility which is starting to make sense is mounting QS8s flat against the ceiling, with the tweeters firing DOWN at 45 degree angles. Not sure if the woofers should point left/right or front/back.
Any comments or ideas ? I would draw a picture but I'm really tired and have to get up soon ;(
Thanks,
John
EDIT - Oh what the heck, here's a diagram :
