5.1 Surround Sound Speaker Placement

While personal preferences for surround speaker placement has as many variations as there are people, Dolby recommends that they be placed on the side walls of your media room, just behind the listening chair. The height should be just above the head of a person, seated. Remember, surround speakers are for diffuse, non-localized sound, so you don't want to point them right at your ears. Placing the speakers on the side walls provides an additional advantage. It allows for a continuous sound field, front to back.

If side mounting isn't an option, you can put them on the back wall, but it's not recommended for the best sound. You might end up breaking up the sound field, and creating gaps in the sound from back to front. Again, make sure they are just high enough to fire over the listener's heads.

If you're prohibited from mounting on your walls for some reason, you can sometimes get speaker stands to stick your surround speakers on.

6.1 and 7.1 Surround Sound Speaker Placement

Some advanced home theater receivers have decoding and amplification for 6.1-channel surround sound formats. These formats heighten the sense of "wraparound realism" by adding an extra surround channel. With these receivers, you can add an additional "back surround" speaker, or in the case of 7.1, a pair of them.

In a 6.1-channel system, place the left and right surround speakers to the side of, and just behind, the listening chair, just like you would with a 5.1 system. Then you'll add the back surround speaker right in the middle of the back wall, again firing about the heads of the listeners.

Although some speaker setups are as "7.1-channel." To be honest, there aren't any true 7.1 channel surround sound formats available. What happens is that they play 6.1-channel surround sound, splitting the back channel between two speakers. So, 7.1-channel surround is really just 6.1 channel surround with an extra speaker.

Dipole? Bipole? Quadpole? What Are We Talking About Here?

The most common form of commercially available surround speakers are front firing, and have a single horn and driver. Some have options that allow you to select a Dipole or Bipole setting. Bipole and Dipole speakers generate as much force forwards, as they do backwards, resulting in two separate sound fields. The difference is that the resulting frequencies are "in phase" with a Bipole speaker, and "out of phase" with a Dipole speaker. Phase refers to the relationship between the two frequencies. You definitely want your front speakers to be in phase. Frequencies that are out of phase tend to get muddy and indistinct. They stay localized to the speaker. Which one is better for a surround speaker seems to be a matter of taste, though.

A multi-directional firing designs are normally better at reproducing the theater experience in small and medium rooms. Be careful when placing these too far behind the listening chair, though. You don't want the tweeters of a surround speaker to be pointed straight at it.

Movies vs. Music

Most movies are mixed using multipole speakers, while most music that is mixed for surround (such as SACD and DVD-Audio discs) is mixed with direct front-firing speakers. Frankly, each will sound best using the kind of speakers they were mixed on. Most people don't have room, or money, to buy two sets of surround speakers, though. Depending on where your priorities are, you'll want to choose one system or the other. Most music isn't being mixed in surround just yet. Given the minimal amount of DVD-audio disks vs. DVD movies, my recommendation is to get a good set of multipole surround speakers and just use them.

 Continue on to place the subwoofer.