Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Dolby Pro Logic IIz Height Channels Which Speakers

I am looking at purchasing the Onkyo TX-NR1007 which adds the option for Front Height Channels.

For Speakers I plan to purchase the M80s, VP150 and QS8s for Rear Channels.

Which Axiom speakers would be well suited to the Front Height Channels?

Is anyone currently running Front Height channels?

Thanks for any help anyone can provide.

I would imagine either M22's or M2's to the best match depending on the size of your room and how much space you have to put them.

DB, since the material which is extracted and sent to the height speakers is diffuse in nature, speakers which are similar in nature, such as one of the QSs, would be most appropriate.

I would also say the Qs4 or Qs8's would be a good choice, that is if your considering Axiom.

The Onkyo TX-NR1007 also has Audyssey DSX which allows you to use two of the following 3 combinations L/R rear, L/R heights, L/R wide without using an external amplifier.

http://www.audyssey.com/technology/dsx.html

For the height channels my preference would also be the QS speakers unless the speakers are going to be very far away like 15 feet or more and then maybe the M2s might work better. I’m just saying 15 feet because from my limited experience that about were I find I prefer direct radiating surround back speakers over multi-polar speakers like the QS. But the QS speakers will give a great combination of direct and diffuse sound which I believe would work best in most cases.

However, if you plan to also try these speakers out as L/R wide speakers then perhaps direct radiating speakers like the M2 or M22 would work best but not really sure since I haven’t read up on them or tried it myself yet. One thing I have read is that people seem to prefer the wide speakers to the height speakers indicating they make a bigger difference.

I just bought eh Onkyo 3007 and have a pair of M22 I could use as wide or height and could also switch my QS8 surround backs to up front to have a listen. However, things are getting very busy at work an I might not have the time very soon.

Cheers,
Dean

Ok this got me curious so I did some looking and found this:

Dolby Pro Logic IIz vs. Audyssey DSX vs. DTS

Playback Learns About Audyssey DSX: Part 3

I’m glad to see this topic come up again. I’ve been researching this since PLIIZ and DSX were first announced. It just happened to coincidentally align with my inclination to add a second set of surround speakers in between the existing set and my mains. I started studying Dolby, THX, Audyssey and DTS. All four of them have their own ideas to where speakers should be placed, the type of speakers used, and the type of sound field that is best. It gets very confusing. It also creates problems if you need to pull wires through walls, floor joists, ceilings….. 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. In my case, that just won’t work. Wires strung all over the place look tacky to me and I won’t have it. That means I get to cut sheet rock and do a lot of cussing.

If you read Dolby’s information, height speakers go directly above your mains. The type of speaker they recommend is not clear to me. They recommend neither directional nor non-directional. It appears to be somewhere in between. They speak to “ambient” sound like rain and helicopters, but they also want the speakers to create an imaging that gives the listener a somewhat directional perspective. I think a set of QS speakers would work for this application, but then again, a set of directional speakers would probably work too.

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. They also have width speakers, but they suggest they be placed at ear level and somewhere between the height speakers and the surround speakers. These speakers, from what I can interpret, should be non-directional. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t want a set of speakers at ear level in the middle of my room, I’d prefer to have these closer to my ceiling as my furniture occupies the middle of my room.

DTS has not come out with any height or width processing yet, but I’m certain they will. 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 do know that if DTS could corner the consumer market, you would see a very different speaker layout than you do now. DTS has a strong preference for use of directional speakers, all aimed at the very center of the room (they call the sweet spot), spaced somewhat evenly around the room. You would also see a speaker directly above you in the ceiling, pointing down to the “sweet spot”. Due to the unconventionality of this, and consumer resistance, DTS never did move this model forward. There is also the problem that this layout is more of a benefit to a room where seating is limited to one position, which would not work very well for the majority of consumers.

THX appears to be sitting on the fence and they don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, but they do seam to prefer width over height. I think THX is waiting to see what the market does before they commit to Dolby or Audyssey or DTS or come up with their own preferred speaker layout. Personally, I don’t pay much attention to THX.

All of this is fascinating! However, it seems as though the audio powers are in the midst of yet ANOTHER major set-up overhaul. Which makes it hard to go out and commit a major investment in a reciever. That happened to me when I bought my Denon 4808... it seemed like it had all the bells and whistles I could ever need for the next 15 to 20 years. However, just a few years after I bought it HDMI was introduced, and it quickly became obsolete there after.

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.

Since no movies are being encoded with discrete "height" channels, as a previous Yamaha owner, this just looks like the feature of extra "presence" channels revisited and now gone more mainstream as Dolby has something else to license. Sound will be primarily extracted from the existing L/R channels and some from the center in one form or another probably altering the phase a little bit and placed in to these elevated speakers. This even reminds a little of the pre DD and DTS sound days when designated 70mm theaters use to add an extra pair of speakers in the front. Sounds like marketing to me and I am not getting too excited about it.

I am wondering how people are going to react to the idea of adding even more speakers now that they are labeling this a "9.2" set-up?

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.



Good insight I hadn’t picked up on that.


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.



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.


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