Kaisergrendel Wrote:Hi all, My home theatre is nearly all done. I have a total of 8(7.1) speakers but my living room can only accomodate 5.1 because of the size and the arrangement, BUT can be temporarily upgraded to 7.1 in a pinch. For my home theatre's opening day I'm inviting a few friends over and play T:L (naturally). Would anyone be able to tell me if there's a significant improvement in sound by going from 5.1 to 7.1?

I would highly recommend the 7.1 soundtrack. I use a 7.2 setup and it really rocks. Tron Legacy is one of the rare movies that they actually released in 7.1 and has a great quality soundtrack. I think in terms of sound quality it is the best blu-ray release yet, going up against movies like Transformers 2 (although that movie wasn't nearly as entertaining).

I had some friends visiting us this past week and I actually used Tron Legacy as my demo disk, they were blown away.

By the way, I started a thread a few months ago with people posting pictures of their home theater setups. If you have time post your pictures. People are real friendly in giving feedback. The link is:

http://www.tron-sector.com/forums/default.aspx?a=top&id=426976

Also, you can check out more pics of my setup at:

http://www.blu-ray.com/community/gallery.php?member=invenio

I recently got a Laserdisc player so I plan to calibrate it and post some pics in the next few weeks (I am first going to ride out the Hurricane! and I'm going to London at the end of the week so probably when I get back).

Kaisergrendel Wrote:Thanks DrP, that thread is one of my favourite ones on this forum. I feel very fortunate that us T:L fans have more than just the world of Tron to be proud of. It's one of my biggest motivators for setting up my home theatre. One question though - How does that centre channel sound so close and parallel to the floor? How about the off-axis performance and early reflections you get from the timber floor? I have mine under the TV and I feel that even in that position the high freqs are being muffled. (Perhaps angling mine towards ear level would help) I think I'm going to go ahead and show TL to my friends at 7.1. I'm getting pretty severe nulls with my single sub so I'm already thinking of getting another one. Bloody hell, the cost of good sound!

I agree with you completely, Tron fans have other interests and things to be proud of. I find that the tron-sector is highly varied and vibrant when it comes to interests. Kudos to all the members!

As for the question of the center speaker, it's funny you are not the first to bring this up. I thought this would be a big problem but I think I simply got lucky with the room acoustics. First my seating position is about 12 feet away from the speaker so I think the sound has time to diffuse by the time it reaches me. I think I will still buy a center speaker stand but I want one which is only a few inches off the ground and can be angled. I have been looking into buying an M2 Lovan speaker stand, but not sure yet. One thing I have noticed is that if you have the room, have the speakers away from the wall. Some speakers do ok, but others really come alive and give a much better "open" soundstage if they have some room to breath.

Having a dual sub setup is something many home theater enthusiasts like very much. First, I think it is much easier to achieve an "omni-directional" sound with more than 1 sub. People often forget that if you close your eyes and can point to you sub by listening, then this is NOT good. LFE should appear to be coming from everywhere which is very different than the satellite speakers which SHOULD be directional. this is a nice little piece on sub placement:
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-9936409-285/how-to-set-up-a-subwoofer/I find if you have 2 subs it is much easier to get a better sound. First, you don't have to turn them up as much and thus less risk of distortion, and you are creating more sound waves bouncing from different locations and it thus becomes truly "multi/omni-directional".

Definitely let us know what you decide on and post some pics when your done! Best wishes.

Kaisergrendel Wrote: DrP Wrote:As for the question of the center speaker, it's funny you are not the first to bring this up. I thought this would be a big problem but I think I simply got lucky with the room acoustics. First my seating position is about 12 feet away from the speaker so I think the sound has time to diffuse by the time it reaches me. I think I will still buy a center speaker stand but I want one which is only a few inches off the ground and can be angled. I have been looking into buying an M2 Lovan speaker stand, but not sure yet. One thing I have noticed is that if you have the room, have the speakers away from the wall. Some speakers do ok, but others really come alive and give a much better "open" soundstage if they have some room to breath. Lucky you, my house isn't very generous space-wise and I had to make do with pretty much pushing the speakers right up to the wall. That said, my main speakers are transmission lines and don't seem to be too adversely affected by SBIR, at least in terms of proximity to the rear wall. DrP Wrote:Having a dual sub setup is something many home theater enthusiasts like very much. First, I think it is much easier to achieve an "omni-directional" sound with more than 1 sub. People often forget that if you close your eyes and can point to you sub by listening, then this is NOT good. LFE should appear to be coming from everywhere which is very different than the satellite speakers which SHOULD be directional. this is a nice little piece on sub placement: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-9936409-285/how-to-set-up-a-subwoofer/I find if you have 2 subs it is much easier to get a better sound. First, you don't have to turn them up as much and thus less risk of distortion, and you are creating more sound waves bouncing from different locations and it thus becomes truly "multi/omni-directional". Preaching to the choir my friend I'd sure like a second sub right now but after refitting my living room + cost of speakers + cost of finishing them, I'm just about as broke as broke gets. Just a matter of time though I did a bit of calibration today and that cleared up quite a few problems, especially with the soundstaging since the speakers were all slightly out of phase before. That combined with tweaking the crossover and the bass nulls I was hearing before have smoothed out a lot, which is sweet since the system isn't screaming "ADD SECOND SUBWOOFER" at the moment I still get an awkward bass ceiling where if you stood up pretty much anywhere in the room you'd get this overpowering boomy effect, but who watches movies standing up xD DrP Wrote:Definitely let us know what you decide on and post some pics when your done! Best wishes. I'm definitely going with 7.1 now thanks to your advice, and pics will be coming to your home theatre thread when I've cleaned up the installation

Some rooms are going to be more conducive for speaker placement than others but I think some good calibration and some tweaking and you'll have a great sounding system (sounds like you already do!). I usually start out by placing the speakers "roughly" where I want them and then take measurements to the listening position for reference. Then I will run a calibration with my receiver (high end receivers usually have decent ones and they include the setup mic). This gets me 90% percent there. I will then plug in the distance measurements that I measured, and then finally just do some fine tuning with my ears and calibration discs. It takes a little time and effort but once it's done you really get to enjoy the best output that your equipment has to offer. Sometimes I can't believe people will spend 100's of hours watching movies and listening to music, but they are too lazy to spend an hour calibrating it to make it actually sound good!

I view home theaters as a journey and not a destination. There is no need to rush and buy every piece of equipment out there. Sometimes having a limited budget is actually a good thing, you really start to think about what you want/need/expect from a purchase. It's also good to take a little "forced" break from shopping and it allows you to play with(appreciate) the things you already have.

With the "booming" sub issue I think you have 3 choices (other than going to a 2 sub setup). First, do nothing, if it's only a problem when at standing level then it shouldn't matter too much as most people watch movies sitting! The other is to continue to play with the sub placement or moving other things around in the room like furniture. Last, you can buy some sound proofing/bass catchers. They're pretty inexpensive. You can check some out at:
http://www.foambymail.com/bass-and-broadband-absorbers.html

Keep up the good work!

I found in smaller rooms that a 7.1-speaker layout is best when the sitting position isn't along a back wall. This will allow you to get some decent rear-vs-side separation.abortion pills online abortion questions cytotec abortion

smoreyjinza Wrote:I found in smaller rooms that a 7.1-speaker layout is best when the sitting position isn't along a back wall. This will allow you to get some decent rear-vs-side separation.

This is not only true of small rooms but generally of any size rooms. In the ideal situation you should be equal distance from all the speakers. That way the receiver should minimize level differences between the speakers and introduce less distortion and other artifacts. My room is about 500 sq feet and I sit right in the middle of the speakers and this definitely improves the overall experience when compared to some very exaggerated volume increases/decreases between each speaker. We have to remember the inverse square rule of physics in sound, every time you increase the distance from you to a speaker the amplitude (volume) drops off by the square of that. So if you are sitting 2 feet from the back speaker and 8 feet from the front, the back will sound 16 times as loud (can somebody check to make sure I'm doing my math right ).

We have to remember that the original encoded volumes in movies is balanced for equal distance and volume so clearly we want to do as minimal amount of tweaking as possible. Room acoustics will also change this slightly but my level differences between my speaker settings don't exceed 1 db +/- and usually less (I don't know how this translates into true sound level differences as this "db" value is merely reflecting my Onkyo TX=SR875 setting parameters).

I have a nice little 3D mockup of my home theater room that I did during the planning stage. It was nice because I could actually measure the speaker distance before the room even was built. It allowed me to plan out listening position and how the room would look! You can find some pics of this here:

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