I need some major help setting up my system and this probably is my last attempt to get this right before I quit & take everything back (the wife is not happy
). My room dimensions consist of 19x16 with 8' ceilings & carpet. The major issue is the room layout, pretty much no wall space and our sitting distance from couch to speakers is 16'. There's at 7ft wall behind the tv in a corner and a 12' wall behind the couch in the opposite corner. That's it, both of the sides in the living room are open, so we're loosing sound because of the room acoustics & distance. I currently have a dennon 3312ci, Martin Logan dynamo 10" sub & B&W 684 speakers with the matching center & surrounds for a 5.1 system. This is not working, I think the speakers are either to small or just don't work for my particular room. We watch 60% tv, 20 % BD's and 20% music. The budget is 3K not including the av which I think is fine. That's it, please Help!!!
I fear you may have an insoluble problem unless you can change the furniture and seating. Not all rooms are suitable for AV and not all for audio.
There are four major problems here.
1). The TV is across the corner and I assume your B & W speakers are side of the screen. From and audio point of view this is a very bad situation.
2). You have huge sound leakage due to the room being so open. So in effect you have to power that whole level. Apart from this requiring a big system, it is unsatisfactory, as no one can escape the system on that level.
3). Your seating position is far too far from the speakers, you need to be about 8 ft from the speakers.
4). There is a wall right behind your listening position which is always a worst case scenario.
This is not going to work whatever you do or buy with the room as is.
So Questions.
Do you have an enclosed room you could use? If you have a basement do you have or could you make a room dedicated to AV? Ideally all AV systems with surround should be in dedicated spaces.
Can you send is pictures? That would be very helpful. You can pad a few posts to get your post count up so we can see pictures. The best hope is that furniture can be changed and or moved to get the listening position a lot nearer the speakers.
There is one other problem, your speakers have a minimum impedance of 3 Ohms. So the 8 ohm specification is pure fiction. At most those are four ohm speakers. If you have to fill that whole space, you will need more powerful external amplification.
The bottom line is that something has to change in the physical layout or it is a non starter. The best option if possible is a different room.
The problem is that in new TVs the speakers are so poor, because of the slim small surround look, they are now useless unless you set up some type of external sound system.
