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Surround speakers- matching or not

post #1 of 3
9/1/08 at 2:25pm
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I have had a pair of martin logan aeons for about 8 years now just for listening to music. I'm now going to complete a home theater setup and I hope to still use the aeons for my mains. I'm looking at adding a sub first and will go with a descent or depth, probably leaning towards the depth. I'll then purchase a stage for the center hopefully sometime in the near future. My system is a large open room in the basement and I don't have the walls necessary for mounting my surrounds. The best I can do is to attach my surrounds to the ceiling, hopefully hanging them down from something like omnimount brackets. I prewired my ceiling to except my surrounds and put in a couple of 2X4's between the floor joist to handle brackets and weight. The only surrounds that Martin logan makes that might possibly work for my space are the vignettes, the frescoes are too wide. But I would rather use small (around 12" high by 8" wide) bookshelf speakers on the omnimount ceiling brackets. How important is it that the surrounds match in timber with the rest of the speakers? Has anyone had experience with matching martin logan speakers with a different brands surrounds? I would think that as long as the surrounds are of a high quality, that exact timber matching wouldn't be as much of an issue? Am I wrong?
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post #2 of 3
9/2/08 at 8:03am

Re: Surround speakers- matching or not

I cannot comment about our specific speakers, but here are my general comments:

1. It is highly recommended that all speakers are the same, but like you, most of us cannot justify replacing good speakers just to meet this rule.
2. I do not have timbre matched speakers, except up front. These three speakers are the most important since the sound from movie sound tracks frequently pan across the entire sound stage and you don't want the sound to be audibly different when this happens. That said, for may years I did not have matching speakers up front and was satisfied with the results.
3. I do not personally believe that matching the surround speakers, and rear speakers for a 6.1 or 7.1 systems, are as important as the front speakers. Most of the time the sound from the back speakers is totally different than what is coming at you from the front so exact matching is not high on my list of priorities. The one big exception is for concert DVDs and Blu-rays. Many concerts that I have listened to are mixed such that much of the main audio comes from all speakers (as if the listener was standing in the middle of the band). This situation is not typical; most of the time the back channels for concerts contain only crowd noise, but that is not always the case.

My .02 cents anyway.....
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post #3 of 3
9/14/08 at 12:51pm

Re: Surround speakers- matching or not

My fronts and surrounds are matched. My rear (7.1) were an old pair of surrounds. I can't tell that the 4 don't match. YMMV.
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