Surround Music Speakers

The old JBL Synthesis system had a switch to use for music or movies- cool system.

I use 14 old Radio shack LX5 speakers- they have dipole tweeters. Dipole tweeters give a more open sound.
Yeah, they are out of production, but there might be some other dipoles that appeal to you.

The ITU standard for surround sound specifies 5 speakers:

3 in the front, left and right 30 deg from the center in each direction (i.e. left and right are 60deg from each other)
2 in the rear: 110 deg from the center channel in each direction.

All tweeters at, or slightly above the ear level. Surround sound, notably, requires 5 identical speakers i.e. no special speakers in the rear or surround channels.

Practically you can get away from this predicament with bass managment as long as the tweeters/midrange drivers are the same in all 5 speakers.

That's ITU, there is no mention of bipole speakers and the LFE channel driver can be set up based on room acoustics. Everything else is just superflous with a un-honoroble mention going to THX for reinventing the wheel and going against the widely adopted standard... Lucas is just a very greedy man..

What's ITU? I never heard of them.

THX specified dipoles for the rear with prologic. One reason I went with dipoles was that I got a larger sweet spot. Before, it sounded great, but I tried sitting where my wife sits and it was rather sour

International Telecommunication Union - the international standards body that defines formats for recorded media and broadcast. They have a standard which defines the reference 5.1-channel set-up (and indeed 2-channel). This is closely followed for music production, and surround sound music recordings will have been monitored on an ITU system (as described by (l)user above).

However, films are usually mixed for cinemas with large arrays of surround speakers, and DVDs generally reproduce this cinema mix. Thus it's often preferable to use dipoles to get a more diffuse effect, as the film producers intended.

Personally, my priority is music, so I get as close to ITU set-up as I can. I'm currently using the KEF eggs, which have 5 identical monopole satellites, which is nice.

If you want to go nuts, get a receiver/amp which supports two separate A/B surround pairs, as some Denons do, and switch between monopoles and dipoles for music and film.