Room Layout Help - Long Narrow Room

[veovius]

I am picking up my first receiver tommorow, and I was wondering how to layout my room to take advantage of it. It's a 7.1 receiver, so I am hoping to set it up for that, as opposed to 5.1. I'm getting a pair of Paradigm Titans for the fronts, and some random other speakers for the surrounds. I've got a long narrow room, 11' x 18', and right now it's laid out almost like two rooms, with the TV part taking up about half the room. I had some spare time, so I used some cardboard and a corkboard and made a mock-up of the room to scale, since I don't have any mad photoshop skills Oh, 2 squares is 1 foot.

The first picture is the layout of the room as it is. The second picture is what I'm thinking about changing it to, to take advantage of the surround speakers. Is there any other layout you can think of that might work for 7.1? I've racked my brain for a while now, and I can't think of anything.

The last two pictures are just for an idea of what the room looks like...sorry about the mess, it's been used for storage as we had house guests recently. If you're wondering why there's a rabbit head, you can just see the edge of the 6 foot tall, 3 floor cage in the last picture.

 

[jostenmeat]

Get all the speakers to be symmetrical, so to speak.

Then when it's movie time, slide the couch over so that it's centered. No one is going to like having a surround speaker blasting directly into their ear.

Aim for 38% room length from either front or back wall to your ears. That number, which is 6.84', might drop a tad, depending on the room. Yes, lengthwise is definitely best.

If say your eyes are 6' from front wall, and the TV is 1' from front wall (eyes are 5' from TV), and the TV is 42" (can't tell really), your viewing angle is then 33.9 degrees, which is a very good starting point for immersion with 1080p. (THX recommends 36).