I don't know if a dream home theater and a dream music listening room can be the same. Even though great speakers are great speakers, the setup for these two would fundamentally be different.
It starts with the room.
A home theater IMO should have three dynamic, horn type sealed speakers mounted behind an acoustically transparent screen. Rectangular rooms are most understood in terms of acoustic research. You want a room that has a dead silent noise floor. You want around eight 15" or 18" high excursion sealed subs (CSS SDX15mk2, TC Sounds LMS-5400 or Re XXX ) throughout, in order to reach deep and load every seat the same. They will need a ton of power to equalize properly. I'm talking, like four 20A 120V lines just for the subs.
- and we want a dedicated well ventilated closet area that can house amps. This lets us use ultra high power amps with cooling fans.
Using high output sealed speakers is normally a good idea. We can set them to "large" on our reciever and have them blend very well with subwoofers, without using "unreliable" crossovers. Getting that blend to work right is a long process but well worth it.
A music listening room normally has three excellent, identical full range speakers, well away from any walls (at least 4 to 6 feet). Because the center is well away from the wall, you can't hide it behind a screen. These speakers generally have wider dispersion than horn speakers - horns by nature beam sound while acoustically small sources, often with rear radiation, send sound in specific directions. Obviously this is a problematic conundrum!
The only way to do both at the same time would be to have a room behind a room. That is, a very long room, where the first third is cut off by a HUGE acoustically transparent screen - covering the entire area with no walls.
The best modern custom installers actually have CAD programs for designing entire rooms. This is where this needs to start. You have to start from the ground up (literally, you don't want ground loops
)
Only once you've got a perfect listening room in place should you start looking at speakers. The listening room should be sufficiently live, with a RT60 near 500ms but with plenty of diffusion but a lot of bass trapping.
I second the suggestion to call high end pros like Keith Yates. These types of people design recording studios for a living.
That brings us to speakers. You want speakers that have perfect measured off axis response. If the side wall, floor, or ceiling reflections are not sufficiently similar to the on axis response (and this includes many high end speakers - B&Ws, Wilsons etc) then reflections become a source of smear and coloration. You might think to attenuate that with "speaker treatments" - absorption panels - but these often have a negative effect on the experience of sound . A few speakers I would be looking at would be
TAD Reference One
kGenelec 8260A
Revel Ultima Salon 2
Salk Soundscape 12
Gedlee Summa
JBL DD66000 Everest II
Seaton Catalyst
For processors, I would be looking at the Denon AVP-A1HDCI most likely. Not the absolute most modern unit in terms of features, but it's very top end and very customizable.
For amps, I would prefer active loudspeakers from the start. Otherwise I would be looking at Marantz 9S2 amps
1) Should I go for 7.1ch or should I go higher as the content available is max for 7.1ch?
7 channels is all you need - QUALITY not QUANTITY. For subs though, you want many, because of how they interact with the room, and so that you can get bass down to 5hz
2) Should I spend less on the subwoofer and concentrate more on the central speaker as I do not want much bass but want to hear crystal clear dialogues from movies.?
Good Bass and Crystal Clear dialogue are MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. Clean, low distortion bass from multiple sources, setup properly, will never be problematic. You want all the headroom in the world, and with bass, headroom is a problem. if you don`t have headroom you are not reproducing the entirety of the soundtrack. What you think bass is, is not what real bass is. Don't be afraid of bass - properly setup bass is absolutely the way to go - although yes, properly setup main speakers are that much more important. What many people find offensive with bass is
1) Distortion because bass is difficult to reproduce
2) Obnoxiously imbalanced frequency response
If you can get flat frequency response IN room down to 20hz with no peaks or valleys, with the low distortion afforded by multiple 18-in woofers you'll find the sound is very much NOT like "bass effects" and a lot more tactile, a lot less audible, and music sounds more organic. It will never overpower the rest of the system, nor should the rest of the system overpower your subs - it should be a system which works in synergy - speakers and subs should blend seamlessly such that you don't even realize you have subs.
At the end of the day bass is about MEASURING your performance IN-ROOM.
3) What are reference speakers and in what manner is it different from floor standing speakers.
Floor standing speakers stand on the floor.
Reference speakers are a myth. On paper it`s a speaker that is absolutely perfect in every aspect - and does absolutely nothing wrong to the signal. Speaker design on the other hand is a compromise by nature. If we're talking about refernece, then we need to consider recordings. Recordings simply don't capture the information the same way one would hear it at the live event. The closest a stereo or surround speaker system can do is to give the ::illusion:: of being there - to make you believe it is real instruments and voices in front of you, or the real ambience of the venue inside your room.
With that said, the best speakers
Are timbrally accurate, have stable image with a wide, tall, deep soundstage, and extract all the details in a recording, including dynamic content (quiet details, and the loudest details, should all be lifelike).
4) Should I opt for a complete set of speakers or should I select components one by one if so should I stick with a same company (which ever you suggest of course) or should I go for diff components from diff companies.?
Every piece should be individually selected.
5) Should I opt for cinema speakers instead?
Professional Cinema speakers? Some are great, but the compromise here is that they sometimes trade maximum absolute fidelity for output and dialogue intelligibility. It's only natural - Cinemas are HUGE! Home Theaters need not be as loud - so you can get away with speakers made for homes and compromise loudness for other factors, of which there are many. And it's easy to get dialogue intelligibility as you are near field.
6) Should I go only for THX certified products?
Absolutely not. THX Certification is not an indicator of the highest end products. It just means a company paid THX to test its product, and that product passed the THX tests. Many other, MUCH finer products simply don't bother with THX certification.
Audition, Audition, AUDITION when it comes to speakers. The list of speakers I gave you earlier is IMO a world class place to start. Don't be confused by the sometimes vastly different price points - sometimes these speakers will sound more similar than not - this is a good thing - because real life sounds shouldn't sound different depending on the speaker reproducing them.
When it comes to electronics, you need measurements and to not get too hung up on them. They are not overly relevant. - ultimately it's all about clean measurements, seating position, speaker position, room acoustics, and speaker acoustics. NO magic at play.
