After staring at my boxed surrounds for almost a month while waiting on my wife's approval of a final arrangement of the living room, I finally mounted them on the wall and did a full system calibration late last night. One reason I was putting it off was that I hadn't yet picked up any drywall anchors for mounting the surrounds, but a quick scan with a studsensor showed me I wouldn't need any as the studs were more or less in ideal locations for mounting.

After the speakers were mounted and the system calibrated, I popped in the SACD remaster of Brothers in Arms that my brother kindly sent me for Christmas. Everything seemed to be dialed in nicely. One thing I noticed is that even though I sit closer to all the speakers in my new living room, I need to have the receiver's volume set higher to achieve the same listening levels as before. The new room is carpeted and decidedly less 'live' than my former room. (We're planning on replacing the carpet with bamboo flooring at some point in the future, so I may be able to recapture some dBs then.)

My SPL meter will now reenter another long period of hibernation.

i was doing the same with my "connections". I have no experience with calibrations and needless to say I was not sucessful. I couldn't use the SPL meter. I still decided to pop in the DVD - attack of the clones for sometime and I thought I heard "clear and crisp" sound. Not sure if this is placebo effect or am I really hearing something better. LOL

Glad to hear that you are up and running.

That is really incredible that the wall studs were in the right place for your surrounds. Throw that variable in with your "wife's approval of a final arrangement of the living room" and it's like the sun, moon and stars all in perfect alignment... at least in my house anyway.

My QS8's are no where near in ideal locations, at all, but they seem to sound fine. Go figure.

Congrats on the new digs...

Must be nice. I don't even have WALLS in the right place for mounting surrounds ;(

What, no pictures?

Pictures.... Now there's an idea! I know I'm slacking, but I have a 512mb SD card full of pics I need to dump onto the computer before taking more. I'll get there.