Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater VP150 as left, right, and center?

Hay Ya'll,

I've started researching speakers for my HT and I was wondering what you all thought of using 3 VP150s as left, right, and center speakers. My situation is this: my screen wall is 11 feet wide and I want to use at least 120" of that width as viewable screen area (Da-Lite High Power is the planned screen). Add 3" borders to each side and that only leaves me with 3" wall space to the left and right of the screen. So I was thinking about putting all three speakers above the screen. The next problem is that my ceilings are only 7 feet high, so speaker height comes in to play. I could probably drop the screen as far as 12" below the ceiling, which greatly opens up possibilites for other speakers, but thinner speakers up there would give greater flexibily in screen height placement. Any suggestions and comments would be appreciated. Thanks.


--James

Hi James,

In principal I think this works nicely. There are a lot of HT systems with 5 identical speakers and a subwoofer. But 2 things come to mind.

Don't know how big your room is or how far back you will be sitting but you may wnat to see the guidelines for viewing distance vs. size of screen in the Newsletter section of this site. If the screen is too big adn you are sitting too close you can see pixelation and you will have to move your head to see the whole screen. If you decided on a smaller screen, I would think about floorstanding sides.

Floorstanding speakers have a frequency response which goes lower than the VP150, some people claim this is nicer for music. The side channels play a lot of music even in movies. The VP150 is -3dB down at 85 Hz and the typical crossover for the subwoofer is at 80 Hz. I think it is debateable whether you will hear this when using a subwoofer, especially for HT.

Hello James,

Excellent advice from Speakerchooser and here are a few tips from me. Generally speaking, if you are viewing true HD material, you should sit no closer than twice the diagonal screen measurement. With DVDs, they look better if you are a bit farther back than that distance. Of course, most projectors have some zoom flexibility so you could reduce the image size somewhat to compensate if you can't sit farther back.

When I joined Axiom, I did elaborate listening tests and comparisons of all Axiom's models. During that time, I tested a VP150 and just for the heck of it, I tried it on its end in mono. I was surprised at how good it sounded and mentioned in a meeting at Axiom later on that we could sell it to use in a vertical orientation for special installations (it wasn't designed to be used that way but it just happens to sound very good).

Regards,

Pictures might help a lot with this situation. Are you sure you can't squeeze speakers on the side of the screen or have floorstanders in the front a litle bit?

How can I attach a picture to my post? Or put a picture in my post? Once you see the effect I'm after, you'll see that squeezing speakers on the sides would mean that they'd have to be really narrow speakers. And I've thought of setting them in front a little bit, but given that the screen will be nearly wall-to-wall, I wonder about someone sitting to the extreme left or right and having an ever so slightly obstructed view with the speaker just clipping the viewing area from that perspective. As far as the 120" wide screen requirement goes: it's just that, a REQUIREMENT! No compromise. Full stop. End of story. I realize I might be making things a little harder than what they need to be, but I'll work around it. I'll git r' done.

The Faqs will explain how to post a picture.

The VP150 is -3dB down at 85 Hz and the typical crossover for the subwoofer is at 80 Hz

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It's interesting. If you look at Axiom's own graph for VP150 it looks like it's -3 dB down at fc=100Hz rather than at stated 85Hz. I wonder if Alan can comment on that.

In addition , some recommend to cross at frequency about twice fc to get a smooth transition to sub. Overall, I would think that the sound quality will be sacrificed by not going to towers.

Get yourself some cardboard and make a box the size of an M60. Your projector's image is coming in at an angle and should miss the speaker. Sit in the side position and check it out. The floorstanders give a different sound you'll want for HT.

Okay, let's give this a try:



This picture was taken from my seating position 15 feet back. As you can see in the pic, the viewable image is nearly wall to wall (and for me, THAT'S home theater). I'll shrink it a little to accomodate borders, but as I said, 120" wide looks good to me from 15' back so I don't want to go smaller than that. In the image shown, there's ~13 inches between the top of the projected image and the ceiling. That's what I'm trying to work with, but...

...maybe I shouldn't have been so firm in my previous post (you know, "end of story" and all that jazz). I realize that shrinking my width requirement to 9 feet opens up a whole lot of options regarding tower/center combos. But after watching that 11' wide image for so long, 9 feet would seem downright small to me, especially with a cinemascope screen .

Oh well, my search has just begun. Thanks for the replies so far. They're very much appreciated.

That is a big picture!

How much room below?

Or maybe 60's in the space above sideways?