Home Cinema Speaker placement

[heisthegaffer]

Hi all

Doing up my new loung but it's not particulary suited to H/C as the front L/R speakers will have to be about 5 metres apart from each other, the centre will be in the middle of them and we will be sat approx 3 or so metres from the centre speaker.

My question is this, will this sound awful movie wise or will the amp be able to correct/make the best of it? I've flogged all my old gear which was based around a Yamaha 2067 and will be going a bit old school with a Yamaha 750SE and a pair of JBL control 1s but will upgrade to a newer amp, probably with a Wharfedal DX1 package. Not for a while though sadly!

Music wise i am not so bothered as I have a straight audio option.

Thanks

[BlueMR2]

A good surround amp should allow for time delay.

[anonymous-user]

So long as you can get the placement to be relatively even i.e. similar distance from left channel to centre, centre to right - and the same for your surrounds, it's a quite straightforward process to get it sounding OK.

Assuming your AV receiever is quite senior in years, it perhaps doesn't have a built-in EQ or room correction. If this is the case, a sound meter from Maplins can be bought quite cheaply. You simply set the channel levels to 75db, with the sound meter centered on your primary listening position, at ear height. This gives you the basis of a calibrated 5.1 system. LFE crossover at 80Hz as a start point and you should be away.

Hope that's of some use. Unfortunately some older kit doesn't allow you to tweak and fine tune crossover and frequency settings so there's not an awful lot you can do beyond getting the channel levels in the ballpark.

[clived]

Matching the levels should be the easy bit, but you'll want an amp that allows you to also add delay per channel, but if I'm visualising your proposed set up properly, you won't actually be a lot further from your front left and right speakers than you will be from the centre, right? Either way, your amp should let you define how far you are sat from each speaker and it will set the correct delay.