GREEN... Looking for help to set up room

C

C R T

Audiophyte
Hey guys, I am likely way off my game with current thoughts of how to set up this room. Please help if you'd like! This is not a serious "movie" room although we will use it often for movies and I ALWAYS have pandora rollin'.

Here is a pic of the room. The TV is mounted center where the bookshelf is in this pic. The receiver will go there too. This is a big, open room... please critique my thoughts below (gently please) and please make suggestions. ($1250ish budget).

1. Polk Audio PSW125 12-Inch sub on floor?
2. Polk Audio RC85i 2-Way In-Wall Speakers... in wall in front? Ceiling front? Bad idea for front speakers?
3. Pioneer VSX-822-K 5.1-Channel Network Ready A/V Receiver??? HELP here too please.



This is the back of the room.

4. Polk Audio RC85i 2-Way In-Wall Speakers... up on short flat wall above island? Bad idea?



More? Less? Totally different? I'm all ears.
 
Pyrrho

Pyrrho

Audioholic Ninja
You are not going to like this. If you want pretty lies [that in the long run will cause you problems], stop reading now, and hope someone with a different mindset replies.


Your room, as is, is very poor for this. First of all, you have too much light coming in; you even have sunlight hitting directly where you say the TV is! It does not get worse than that for light. You also have what appear to be very [acoustically] reflective surfaces everywhere; most of the time, such an environment is extremely poor for audio. A more acoustically dead room is usually far superior to an acoustically live room. For the audio, you will want curtains, carpets, soft furniture, and anything else like that to help keep you from having echos. And any kind of echo will make it harder to understand the dialog when watching a movie.

As for speakers, I am unfamiliar with the particular models you mention, but for the front, you want the speakers to be at about ear level when watching things, so definitely not in the ceiling. For the center front, it should ideally be the same height, and as close as possible to the screen; the ideal would be with the center speaker in the center of the screen itself, though that is not possible with most TVs. For the rear, such things matter far less, so you can get away with ceiling speakers if you must.

For the subwoofer, for such a huge open space, you will need something quite impressive if you want actual depth (or volume) to your bass. Polk is not where I would be looking for this; SVS is the company I would probably go with, though others will likely give you some other recommendations for different brands. But this will likely put you over budget.
 
Pyrrho

Pyrrho

Audioholic Ninja
I suppose I should have mentioned that one might wish to take one's cue from how a movie theater is made. Many have carpet on the floor, and often even carpet on the walls. This helps with the acoustics of the space, as you don't tend to get nasty echos that way that make it hard to hear what anyone is saying. They are also quite dark. With a front projector, like a typical theater, that matters more than with most TVs, but it is still in that direction that you should be thinking for viewing movies on a TV. (A typical theater, by the way, uses an acoustically transparent screen, with the front speakers behind it. With an ordinary TV, you cannot do that, but you should try to get the center speaker as close as possible to that.)

Dolby gives good advice for speaker placement:

Home Theater Surround Sound Speaker Placement and Setup Guide
 
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