5.1/6.1/7.1 placement questions for fairly small room

Originally Posted by Mr. Audio

Both long and short walls have their own unique issues that must be dealt with. If the long wall is chosen, then you have little to no space between the seating position and the back wall and may have some undesired bass artifacts in the form of boominess depending on what your walls are made of. Having your equipment setup on the short wall has the advantage of not being right on the back wall, but can be very problematic for mid bass response since the middle of a room is normally a dead zone for bass unless you have good room treatments and possibly multiple subwoofers. If you don't have those things, you'll most likely to be forced to push your seating position back to 3/4 the distance from the front of the room which will put you almost, not on, but almost to the back wall. For someone with a smaller display than 50 inches will be hatin' life trying to see the screen from that distance. Plus room treatments are even more important since the main speakers will be much much closer to the side walls than if they were setup on the long wall which can destroy sound quality by making your highs sound overly bright and harsh if these reflection points of the walls are not treated with acoustical dampening material. So in the end, a few relatively minor compromises vs. a handful of major ones are usually the choices you are left with.

Many might say that you don't want the couch up against the back wall, and they're right for thinking that. However you will have a much bigger fight on your hands for sound quality in other aspects if you chose the short wall. I have a 21 X 13 room and I tried the short wall. I had tons of low low bass, but no and I mean no mid bass where I needed to sit in order to see my 34 inch TV.

Ideal placement is not something that is absolute. Every room is different. Experimentation and testing is the only way to optimize speaker placement. The best thing I can tell you is to always mind your surroundings while moving your main speakers around. Mind that moving speakers and subwoofers closer to walls may increase their bass response but also may make the bass less accurate and make the highs harsh. Moving them away from wall may decrease their bass response while cleaning up the harsh highs, but dead bass is often way way worse than just harsh highs. Most of the time unless you have treatments and/or extra equipment, you must meet somewhere in the middle of those two. Center and surround speakers must be exactly where they should be, so optimizing them is more up to room or speaker treatments and/or some sort of parametric equalizer like Audessey or YPAO. This all sounds like a pain in the neck, and it certainly is. But it is great once it's all done.

Originally Posted by sdurani

I would keep things oriented that way if you want an effective 7.1 layout, since it will give you good separation between the side and rear speakers. You can usually improve frequency response by placing the listening area at one of the 1/3rd points of the room's dimension. So for a 16 foot length, I would place the couch about 10-11 feet back from the front wall.

That gives you roughly 5 feet to the back wall, where you can mount the rear speakers, spread about 6 feet apart (so you can hear stereo separation behind you). Another pair of the same surrounds you already have (Monitor 30) will be fine for rear speakers. I would mount all four surrounds at least a couple of feet above ear level.

See attached diagram of a typical 7.1 layout.

Good Luck,
Sanjay