Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Help w/Speaker Choice

I am building my HT as we speak. Attached are some photos.

Front view (the screen will be in the opening at the front... and three W22's will be mounted in the short wall in front of the where the screen will go)


This is the right wall (the only place a suround can hang).
http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n3/Jagman96/IMG_0958.jpg

This is the left wall (the equipmant rack is in the front left, but behind that is open space to the living room down below).
http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n3/Jagman96/IMG_0959.jpg

Although hard to see, the area from which the first photo is taken is another staircase that is behind the seated position. That has no bearing on speaker location other than to limit back surrounds to being dirctly mounted to the ceiling or hung from the ceiling.

So...

As you can see the HT is going in a loft. It is about 18' long, 12' wide and has 9' ceilings. I have a front projector and the screen is 110" diag (96"x54"). It will go at the front of the loft above a staircase going down. There is an opening through which one will view the screen. Between the staircase and the screen is a low lying wall that acts as a rail to keep people from falling down, yet the opening above lets light through. Based on screen location, I would greatly benefit from wall mount speakers going under the screen. Since the "wall" is 3' tall, WWT on walls would be perfect... hence I would like to go with three W22s up front. Good dynamics and the same three speakers up front are ideal.

My real question is what to do for surrounds. There is a wall on the right that goes back about 15'. The back and left are essentially open space (so a surround can only be hung on the right wall). In terms of speaker choices, I could go with four W2's and mount them in the ceiling or I could go with 4 QS8's and hang them from Axiom ceiling mounts. The problem is location. Due to the above mentioned limitations from wall location, the R and L surrounds will need to be directly above the right and left arm of the 3 person couch. I could use the ceiling mounts and angle the surrounds down... and the same would go for the rear surrounds. Or I could just go with the W2's. The W2's would be much cleaner looking and have direct radiation (which would be easier to pinpoint). Since they wouldn't be that spread out, the QS8's would offer a very diffuse and very difficult to pinpoint image. This would definiltely be better for Dolby Surround... but I'm not so sure the lack of imaging would be good given the resolution of Blu-Ray.

So... for those that have heard both... particularly in a small room, what is better... ceiling mounted point source surrounds or bipole surrounds hung from the ceiling?

Thanks in advance.

I could see T2's in the ceiling, but I think W2's would look really weird.

I'm a big fan of the QS8's. The advent of Blu-Ray doesn't change the idea behind surround speakers, only the resolution.

I can't really tell how much space you have between the ceiling and the opening on the left side above the railing. Is it insufficient to just put the QS8 on the wall up there?

By far, the most flexible and powerful solution is QS8's on ceiling mount brackets. Given your setup, I'd do that even if it meant only having 5.1.

What are T2's. I looked on the product page but didn't see them.

Hi jag, I don't see them either. Maybe Axiom hasn't got them on the website yet but if you Google "Axiom T2" you'll get a couple of writeups on them, they've only just come out recently.

The InWall version of the M22 and M2's are what Tom is talking about. I don't think Axiom refers to them as T Series anymore.

I'm not a fan of speakers on the ceiling, it really goes against the purpose of how surrounds should be setup, you don't want the sound directed downward. If your going to use a bookshelf design they should at least be mounted on the walls. The Q's would be a better choice and can be mounted pretty high on a wall, or hanging from the ceiling with great results.

I think you're looking for these


However, for surrounds you wouldn't want to pin point where the sound is coming from would you? The whole point of the QS8 is to envelope you with the sound...

Hi Jagman, Hay, SirQuack, Tomtuttle,

Yes, we changed the designation of the "T2" to "in-wall M2" (I secretly still call it the "T2" 'cause it's easier to remember .).

I just want to point out that in my A/B comparisons at Axiom and in my apartment living room of QS8s vs direct-radiating M2s, if you sit in the sweet spot, there isn't much difference--a bit more ambience for music with the QS8s.

However, as soon as you move away from the sweet spot and sit elsewhere in the room, the QS8s are quite superior, and what's interesting is that in my comparisons there was no loss of pinpoint imaging when some sounds were "hard-mixed" to a specific surround speaker---you know, gunshots, person knocking on a door on the other side of a room, etc. Even with multi-channel music, the QS8s do a fine job with hard-mixed surround. I recall an Aaron Neville track (SACD or DVD-Audio) where the backup singers were hard-mixed to the right side surround and that's where they were.

So my vote goes to ceiling-bracket mounted QS8s. I have not auditioned these in that application, but I doubt there would be any significant difference in performance of ambient vs hard-mixed surround info.

Regards,
Alan

Thanks guys. The in walls for the ceiling would definitely be a cleaner look, but as noted above, not ideal. The QS8's would definltey provide more ambient sound. I plan on having two rows of seating so having the side surrounds between the two rows would allow the front tweeter to aim toward the front row and the rear tweeter to point to the rear row. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of the QS8's. BTW, how far should the top of the QS8 enclosure be from the ceiling?

Jagman, you could put them as close as 4 or 6 inches from the ceiling above, but if you have more space, there'll be more reflective informantion bouncing about, which is what you want for envelopment.

Alan

Actually, after reading that write-up a few months back about Dolby labratories, I have been fascinated with the idea of incorporating in-ceiling speakers with the rest of the system. This is after reading about the special room they developed with some 25 or so speakers all scattered around the room, including the ceiling.

I won't be putting 25 speakers in my living room, however, the effects they talked about concerning the in-ceiling speakers was very interesting. To me anyway.