11.x sound for CIH theaters discussion - Page 2

Sidewall at about 60° and angled toward the listening position is what Audyssey usually shows in their literature.  This generally puts the F/W speakers well in front of the center listening position - much more than the side surrounds, which are usually at 90° or slightly behind center as mine are.  So, the F/W's should not confuse themselves with the Side Surround mix.  I just upgraded to a 9.2 AVR and my HT is 20' wide (with 128" wide 2.35 screen) and 32' deep, but only 8' high.  I had pre-wired for 7.2, so the extra speakers require some construction work.  My L/R mains are at screen edge which leaves about 3.5' to the side walls.  Even with that room, the suggested 60° angle puts Wides at the side wall, though still well in front (I sit at about 13').  I already have hard wired rear surrounds, so I have to choose btwn wide/side or rears and either height or wide.  Right now, I have the 2 heights on tripods to test and am about to move them to the wide position, mostly to see if I agree with Audyssey's recommendation about Wide first, then Height, then back Surround last.  

I was really looking forward to trying the Blu Ray of Red Tails for this, but was disappointed to see that it is only a 5.1 mix despite all the talk of its use of 11.1.  I'm not sure what they were thinking when they did that - they sure didn't take us HT owners into account!  Now I'm trying to decide on the best Blu Ray for testing large sound fields that don't get lost in just big explosions, etc.  I have all Def Tech bipoles including large front towers, but they suggest not using bipoles for wide/heights.  So I went with 4 Pro Monitor 1000's for the presence channels.  I hope this is enough "in the family" to not introduce timbre matching issues.  As usual, the hardware tech is well ahead of the content (e.g. HDTV, 3D, 4K) which makes it more difficult, which also makes the lost opportunity of Red Tails disappointing.  Any recommendations for good movie audio choices for testing would be appreciated.

I forgot to mention that in my early test of the Height channel, one movie I tried was Real Steel which had a large outdoor scene in the junk yard with lots of movement and heavy rain.  Whether it was placebo effect to justify the expense or real, the rain really did sound like it was falling all across my ceiling and on my head.  I didn't have the extra 2 speakers yet to try adding the wide, so now that I do, more testing to come.

I did some further experimenting and finally tried the direct radiators as Wide instead of Height (re-calibrated with Audyssey XT32 first).  Despite my earlier enjoyment of the "rain on the roof" reality feel from the Heights, I came to agree with the Audyssey recommendation that (for me) Wide should be 1st priority, then Height, then Back Surround.  There was just such a greater sense of seamless and wide front stage with the Wides vs. the fun but less useful Heights for occasional overhead sound or panning.  Even when playing the very forgettable Red Tails which was mixed for overhead panning of aircraft in both setups, I preferred the Wide over the Height.  Of course, Red Tails was dumbed down to only 5.1 on the Blu Ray so maybe it wasn't such a great test subject.  I put on a couple of good 7.1 mixes I had and both of them sounded great on Wide and a bit less impressive on Height.  My personal feeling right now is that I may forego mounting the Heights and stay with Wides and Back Surround.  Possibly some of this is due to the large size of my room width/depth but with not-so-high ceiling - making the wide sound more enveloping than the effect the Heights had.  I'm guessing we're a long way off before there is any content truly mixed in 9.1, let alone 11.1, so I think I'll be happy with this setup for a while.  It certainly brings the wide to wide screen and makes my CIH setup that much more enjoyable.  It was also nice to find a hidden feature in my new 9.2 AVR that I wasn't aware of when I bought it - but it scales aspect ratio so it's now done at the final stage before going to the PJ vs. previously in the Oppo or by the PJ itself.

As for Josh's question, my personal opinion would be to upgrade to a 9.1 AVR vs. trying to make the Denon 3313 work with additional components.  Franin's suggestion of the 4311 is a good one though getting a bit long in the tooth.  Onkyo also has a couple of well reviewed 9.2 units including the similarly priced TX-NR1009 (I just bought their 3009, which is 9.2 145w for just a bit more). 

Audyssey explains their reasoning/theory pretty well on their website about the priority of Wide-Height-Back.  It's also been discussed pretty well in the Audyssey thread of the Receivers (or Speakers, I forget which one) forum here.  As for Red Tails, the auro 3D may be encoded/limited as suggested - but, the current Dolby solution for decoding "height" info via their PLIIZ doesn't use that coding.  It uses a proprietary algorithm to extract height info from the surround channels and send them to the Height speakers.  My assumption was that 7.1 mixed content would lend itself to this method better than a 5.1 mix, which Red Tails is.  Red Tails could have been released with 7.1 for Blu Ray w/o the auro 3D, just like any other 7.1 Blu Ray and, hopefully, the height info could still decoded even if not optimally.  To go to all the trouble to mix the film so completely and then release it in the most vanilla 5.1 was simply a disappointment to me and many others.  Of course, so was the film itself.