I’m in the process of building a dedicated home theater. One of the problems I’ve run into is which style of speaker to use for the in-ceiling Atmos & DTS-X speaker configurations.
I was going to use ported center channel speakers mounted up into the floor joist area with the faces pointed downward. Once the sheetrock is up, the entire speaker would be hidden except for the grilled face. The reason I wanted to go this route is for 1) A little better bass response 2) Timbre matching the actual center channel speaker 3) Don’t have to worry about people in the second row hitting their heads on the speakers 4) Appearance. However it’s been pointed out to me that this may not be the way to go because of the lack of coverage area, and distorted off-axis sound to those sitting in a different row. So my next choice is to use V shaped bi-polar surrounds mounted to the ceiling. This would certainly cure any coverage and off-axis problems, but because you really can’t mount these up into the joist area, they’d be hanging down where people could hit their heads on them, or possibly end up in the field of view. They also don’t have as good of a frequency range because they aren’t ported, although they would match the side surrounds.
I really don’t care much for the sound from speakers made specifically for in-wall/in-ceiling mounting so I’m not considering that route.
I don’t have much room for angling the center style speakers so I’d still have the problems I mentioned. So I’d like to hear some thoughts on my dilemma, or other suggestions if you have them.
