SURROUND BACK OR HIEGHT SPEAKERS

Neither, go with wides instead. Then experiment with both dipole and bipole to see what sounds best in your room.

^^^x2! Wides are worth consideration and experimenting with.

Can someone explain what is meant by "wides"? I have 7.1 capability on my Denon 1712 receiver, but currently only have it setup for 5.1. I recall in the user manual, there was the option of adding two speakers to the rear of the room, or two speakers to the upper front of the room. Maybe my memory is failing - is there a third option called "wides"? If so, what would be the speaker arrangement?

Check your manual again or just look at the back of your AVR if it's convenient. It'll have a terminal for a wide channel if your AVR offers it.

The wide channel can be placed a foot to several feet outside of your mains. This widens your sound stage very efficiently and adds more sound to your front stage in the way of musical scores.

I don't believe there is any source that sends a separate sound channel to the front heights or wides. There are, however, Blu-Ray movies that have 7.1 sound, and the 6th and 7th channels are for rear surround speakers, not additional front speakers. So I would definitely add rear surrounds before adding additional front speakers.

This is the best advice. The extra front speakers are more for ambience or enlarging the front stage. Front Height speakers work well for certain types of music.

for front wides you need a very wide room, doesn't work for most people

wides need a lot of space to make them sound good, but wides do work better then the rest.

i currently have front heights and it adds a lot to my sound, sounds like a wall of sound coming from in front of me.

My first choice would be Rear speakers, second choice would be Heights, last choice would be Wides. The latter is a little lopsided for my tastes: a full 5 speakers in front of you with only 2 speakers to cover the entire surround field? How is one pair of Surrounds going to be in two places at the same time (at your sides and behind you, simultaneously)?

With 4 Surround speakers, you'll have rear-vs-side separation in the surround field AND greater wrap-around envelopment; difficult to do using only 2 Surround speakers. Plus, there is plenty of source material to specifically take advantage of 4 Surrounds (over 600 Blu-rays with discrete 7.1 soundtracks). Can't say that for Heights and Wides.

IF your seating is at/near the back wall, then Rear speakers are impractical (not enough space behind you). In that case, I would do Height speakers to introduce a vertical dimension to the sound. Heights can turn the typical ring of sound around you to more of a bubble of sound (like going from 2D to 3D), though you can get a bit of that by placing your Surrounds higher above ear level.

Most 7.1 systems I've heard have enough phantom imaging between the Fronts and SIdes that it is almost redundant to use Wide speakers. At best, they could provide imaging stability to off-axis listeners, but that is minor compared to what the Rears and Heights can contribute. IF you're using Energy speakers up front, then I would use your Energy speakers as Sides (set to bipole) and the Def Techs as Rears (also set to bipole). Since the Side speakers are adjacent to the Fronts, better to use the same brand of speaker to keep the sound consistent as it moves off the front soundstage.

By comparison, timbre matching the Rear speakers isn't as critical; they're not near the Front speakers and our human hearing is not so hot behind us.

Don't receivers send the same sound to front wides as they do to front heights? So, isn't speaker placement the real difference between heights and wides?

If an AVR did that, it would seem that the sound field would be in disarray.

Space is crucial when using wides as one member here mentioned, so I'm currently utilizing a 5.0 in my particular set up.

Prior to this, I was using a 7.2 using wides, my room was 15.5w x 26D. my seating was 13' from a 64" display. When a car would drive off to the side either L or R of the screen, the sound would follow, which would really widen my front stage.

In a bar scene, the camera is focused on the bar, off to the side, out of sight, a pool game is going on. The wide speaker produces the sound of that game, not seen but heard as if it were actually taking place in the next room (the movie Invincible for reference).

According to the quoted statement here, if I were using rears, and the car drove off to the side, the sound would carry off but only behind me. IMO, that effect would not be realistic. If I were using heights, the sound would then go up, again, not realistic.

My AVR has never processed sound this way.

I've experimented using all three different channels, heights were great for thunder, jets and planes flying overhead, but the content was limited.

My rears got even less content which was surprising to me. When I employed wides, the AVR utilized much more content. Using bookshelves were fine, but when I used a pair of towers as wides, a whole new level of sound opened up.

To address one concern mentioned earlier here, having five speakers across the front does not over power the rear, on the contrary, in my set up, it was perfect. My FXiA6 di/bipole speakers offer so much sound, having wides was a great balance. The di/pole speakers put sound in front and in back of you as well as the side. I would put my wides up against any rear set up any day of the week.

One other thing to mention about AVR's sending out the same sound to different channels, my AVR utilizes Audessey DSX, this separates intended sounds for different channels

And lets not forget Dolby Pro logic IIZ

Depends on the processing being used for Wides and Heights.

Audyssey generates early reflections, based on concert hall acoustics, that weren't in the original recording. The idea is to simulate a larger space, similar to Yamaha's approach of using reverb and early reflections to simulate a club or church. If you shut off all speakers except for Heights and Wides, the content coming out of them is quite similar. Not surprising since DSX uses delayed/processed copies of sound from the L/R speakers for both Wide and Height outputs.

By comparison, DTS Neo:X extracts Height and Wide signals from the recording itself. Wides are extracted from the Fronts and Sides, like extracting a Centre channel between those speakers to bridge the gap, while Heights are extracted from the Fronts and Rears. So those signals sound different.