Placement of rear speakers

[TheRealOC]

Hi all,

I've posted about the home theatre setup I'm building in our old Irish stone cottage before here ("Please critique my setup!") and here ('Made a pretty stupid mistake in the home theatre setup') We've pre-wired for 7.4.4 setup of all in-wall and in-ceiling speakers (thank you, wife test ) and we were planning on using SoundFrame 3 In-Wall for rear surrounds. Pictures attached below

The Issue:

• My rear speakers are not symmetrically placed. One is 8cm closer to its adjacent wall than the other.
• Right Rear Surround: 38cm from the corner.
• Left Rear Surround: 46cm from the door corner.

Questions:

1. Will this 8cm difference noticeably impact the sound quality?
2. If it does, can digital room correction compensate for this discrepancy?
3. Considering the asymmetry, should I adjust the speaker’s position to achieve better symmetry?

Thanks!

 

[TheRealOC]

Additional Context:
From the blueprints (pictured), the room isn’t a perfect rectangle—it slightly tapers off to the left. This setup makes it challenging to have the rear speakers equidistant from their respective side-walls while aligning them perfectly with the front speakers and atmos in-ceilings. Thankfully, the front speakers are on-wall, providing some placement flexibility.

Any advice greatly appreciated

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

Not ideal, but not a deal breaker imo. We don’t hear nearly as well behind us as we do in front, so I would say you’d mostly never notice.

 

[Wardog555]

Angles matter from the listening position.
It doesn't matter if one speaker is closer to the wall or not.

 

[TheRealOC]

@William Lemmerhirt @Wardog555 Thanks guys, I'll just get the back boxes positioned nicely from aesthetic point of view, and get an amp with digital room correction

 

[DigitalDawn]

Good idea on room correction software. It can fix things quite easily. One thing to keep in mind, sometimes Audssey will misjudge the crossover point, and you will have to manually re-adjust it.

 

[Eppie]

Nice to see you post a follow up to your original. I agree that the angle to seating position is what counts. Your rear speakers are far enough away from the side walls that it won't make an audible difference. The relation to the seat is more important, which is what you have done.

Funny DigitalDawn should mention crossover settings. I just got a new AVR and my front 3 were crossed at 40Hz by Audyssey. That's kind of low for booksehelves, so I bumped it up to 60Hz (80Hz is the default). The EQ from Audyssey was not quite right either so I'm still tweaking. The point being, don't count on DSP getting it correct the first time. Turn the DSP on and off and listen to what it's doing to make sure that it's an improvement. Those tweaks can make a noticeable difference.