I'm renovating our basement and relocating our home theater to a new room.
This room is 3.7m long, 3m wide with 2.1m ceilings. Listening position is 0.5m off the back wall. My use is 80/20 home theater/multi-channel music.
I can wire in for a 7.2 system and am interested in comments here on my speaker choices for the side and rear surrounds.
My fronts are Acoustic Reality Reality 3Ds (no center used). I have a pair of ACI Titan subs and have, in the old room been using my Acoustic Reality Avinci Ones as my rear surrounds in a 5.1 set up (actually 4.2 because of the phantom center and dual subs).
People here may not be familiar with Acoustic Reality gear so briefly, the Reality 3Ds, and the Avinci Ones are monopolar speakers, quite full range (Reality 3Ds are floorstanding and the Avinci Ones are largish bookshelf monitors). Both are high end speakers with Scanspeak woofers and other high end components.
I've read through alot of threads on dipole/bipole/tri/quad/omni and monopole speakers for surround duties.
My takeaway is that in a small room such as mine I may be best off with four omnipolar speakers like the Mirage OMD-5 (is this really no longer for sale?) in the side and rear surround locations.
I would be very keen to hear thoughts for speakers I should consider here.
One thing to explain is that although the room itself is quite small, I can position side and rear surrounds rather freely. I will build a bookshelf behind the listening couch and this will extend outwards towards the front of the theater room, effectively creating a cocoon around the couch.
So I can pretty much place bookshelf style speakers where I want on this bookshelf structure I will build. Nevertheless, the side surrounds will be say a meter to either side of the sweet spot listening position, perhaps a meter higher than the ears, and just behind the ears. I'd position the rear surrounds a meter above my ears and on the bookshelf at the back wall, so 50 cm behind the ears and a meter up.
While I mentioned my Avinci Ones above, I am OK to drop these entirely and put them to use elsewhere so I really am open to suggestions for 4 new speakers (I'd like to keep the budget for these at 1,000 - 1,500 € total).However, I am also open to running speaker cables to wire in 6 pairs of speakers within the bookshelf around the couch, wiring in side and rear surrounds (new speakers), and also wiring in the Avinci Ones which I would position lower down, around ear level, and then switching to a 4.2 speaker configuration when I listen to multichannel music.
Grateful for any and all suggestions,
Dave M
