Sound solution for great room? (1 Viewer)

Hi guys, Alright, so I have my living room, well more of a great room, and I have a fireplace and I would like to put up a mantel and flat screen over it, but the problem is, a few years back I had a huge projection tv and with the room being so big, if you were sitting in front of the television you could barely hear it, but if you were further behind the television, it was way too loud. It seemed that the sound was traveling up and over and then down instead of going right in front of the tv. It is a pretty big room, and we would like to put the flatscreen up on the wall above the fireplace and have a sound system, but also figure out how to make it so the volume is level all around the house. And sorry if it sounds strange, it's a lot easier to show you than type it out to you. Thanks a lot!

Where did you have the speakers placed when you had those weird sound effects? If you used a receiver back before auto-calibration, that "new" feature might go a long way toward solving your problem. It couldn't hurt to post a layout of your room. Also, I have to mention that putting a TV above a fireplace is not recommended. It's to ohigh for comfortable viewing, and the heat from a fire is not good for electronic. That said, I know that sometime it's the only option; just wanted to make sure you knew.

Well mind you this was 6-8 years ago, so I didn't really have a theater system, just the original output speakers that are part of the TV. Do you think that having a theater system would fix this problem? And also, what is auto-calibration? And yes I understand it's not the best solution, but it is the only solution for how our great room is set up. Okay this is a (very bad) quick layout of where I want this to go. It's not exact and to scale, but it shows what is where.

what is auto-calibration?

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To properly set up a 5.1 or 7.1 system, you have to make sure the speakers are all playing at the same level. That way the fronts don't over power the rears and vice-versa. Same with the other speakers as well. Back in the stone age (a few years ago) we would use an SPL meter and a DVD that had discreet tones for each speaker. We would play the disc and adjust the volume of each speaker until they were all set to output the same SPL. We would also measure the distance between our seating position and each speaker and adjust the delay so that the sound would reach us at exactly the same time. My wife loved holding a measuring tape to her head while I did this. With auto-calibration, I set the supplied microphone on a tri-pod at ear level in my seat. I plug it into the receiver and start the auto calibration routine. It beeps, burps, buzzes and clicks for a few minutes. When done, it did what used to take me an hour or two to complete and with much better accuracy. I do tweak my settings a little after auto calibration but that is just a personal preference of mine.