atmos home cinema ( 5.1.2 or 5.1.4

[Gerd Peeters]

hello, i'm new here and i have some questions about my atmos home cinema. My sofa is 50 cm of the wall and my atmos speakers hang a little bit in front of me against te ceiling, my rear speakers stand offcourse against the wall. My question is can i put another pair of atmos speakers agains the ceiling at the but the would be in line with my surround speakers ?

thnx

 

[shadyJ]

Its hard to know what you are describing without pictures or a diagram. You need to get as close to Dolby's recommended placement for Atmos as possible. The Atmos system is assuming a specific speaker placement. Read through this guide.

 

[Latent]

From your question you seem to want to have your front Atmos ceiling speakers and rear on wall height speakers. This may not be a textbook Atmos setup and weather it is supported is up to the AVR you have that does all the work rendering the sound for your speaker layout. Right now only the very top of the line AVR's fully support 4 height channels with many mid level ones having some limitations that may not let you do 5.1.4.

The top two Yamaha units RX-A2050/A3050 have three selectable positions for atmos speakers (front/rear height, overhead and Dolby enabled speaker) and it states on page 24 in the Owner's Manual

http://download.yamaha.com/search/product/?language=en&site=usa.yamaha.com&category_id=16622&product_id=2055825

You can configure the placement patterns for front presence and rear presence speakers seperatly

which suggests that these units at least have the option to support what you wanted. Will it sound great would depend a lot on your room and layout though. The higher end RX-A3050 unit even has settings for speaker angle for each speaker and also height of the atmos/presence speakers so it in theory actually knows exactly where you have placed them and came in theory adjust for non ideal placement. I don't know if this has been fully tested to see if it actually work for Atmos yet though.

Just as a guess though I would say having two different types of height speakers would not give as convincing a sound field as keeping them the same as sounds may not pan overhead as smoothly.

 

[Gerd Peeters]

i have the pioneer sc-lx89 and ik can support 5.1.4. So as you can see my years are against the wall and i was thinking i put 2 heightspeakers against the wall facing down, but i don't know if the 2 back atmos speakers would be in the same line with the surroundspeakers. So what must i do, a friend of mine has 5.1.4 and i find that it gives a more hole in the ceiling effect .

 

[Latent]

Looks like you have 5.1.2 with Top middle overhead speakers. If you move to 5.1.4 you would ideally want to move to using Top front and top rear overhead speakers. go to the pdf link shadyJ linked to and find page 18. Now measure the angle from your head while seated to the back corner. if it is between 125- 150 degrees (see the bottom right diagram on page 18) then you could place a down firing speaker on the ceiling at the back of the room. To work out this angle just measure the distance from your ears to the wall and the distance to the ceiling from your ears (when seated).

Then go to this website:

https://www.easycalculation.com/trigonometry/triangle-angles.php

change the first drop down to angle and the second to Hypotenus side and then fill in opposite side and enter inches/cm to the ceiling you measured and in the adjacent side enter the inches/cm to the back wall. This gives you an angle (ignore the second angle B and only look at the top angle figure) but it is a backwards angle so you need to use a calculator and type 180 - [Angle] to get the final angle you want

If the angle is less than 125 degrees then you don't have enough back wall room to be in spec and have to move the couch forward...

Also have to repeat these angle steps to find the position to move your top middle speaker to a top front position.

Another option if the angle is less than 125 degrees and you can't move the couch is to move to a Front Height and Rear Height speaker setup. Then you can place the Rear Height speaker near the top of your rear wall angled slightly down and it needs to be at an angle of 135 - 150 degrees which you can get by dropping it down the wall a little. For the front you can use a front height height channel if you can get it between 30 - 45 degrees (check page 34-35 of the dolby pdf above). If the front wall is too far away you could go with a ceiling mounted Top Front setup (30-55 degrees) along with your rear height but you have to make sure your AVR supports this setup.

Also before you make this setup permanent I would try and make the speaker placement temporary somehow so you can try what works best before you install the speakers and hide the cables etc.