How Would You Do Dolby Atmos in this Room? Is It Worth It? (1 Viewer)

[Gunnett]

My current 5.1 is in an open living room in my townhouse. The entire setup occupies a 9-foot wide by 12-foot deep area. I have three Ascend Acoustics CBM-170 SE as my Fronts and two Ascend Acoustics HTM-200 as my surrounds. I have been curious about going to Dolby Atmos 5.1.2 but I am not sure how to do it with the way the room is laid out. What about putting some HTM-200 much higher up on the back wall and have them angled down for Dolby Atmos Height speakers?

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Welcome to the Forum!

Atmos speakers should be in-ceiling – Dolby has example system layouts on their site. No reason why it won’t work in your room, but if you can’t accommodate in-ceiling for some reason, probably best to stick with 5.1.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[JohnRice]

Yeah, they should be in or on-ceiling and in front of the viewing location.

 

[Gunnett]

Welcome to the Forum!

Atmos speakers should be in-ceiling – Dolby has example system layouts on their site. No reason why it won’t work in your room, but if you can’t accommodate in-ceiling for some reason, probably best to stick with 5.1.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

It's a finished ceiling with no access. I wouldn't know how to even begin to mount speakers and run wire. I guess I should reach out to a professional installer if I would explore an in-ceiling option.

 

[Rob W]

Absolutely you can do it. I also have no access for in-ceiling speakers so tried an inexpensive experiment using 2 Cambridge Audio Minx 12 speakers. They were relatively inexpensive and small and light enough that they can be mounted using velcro tabs on the speaker and the walls. You will be truly surprised how loud they can play, and since you're in a townhouse I assume you never try to blast the roof off the place. I was so impressed with the first set of speakers I picked up a second pair, so I now have two fronts and two rears. You can see how it looks in my pics - your only problem will be hiding the speaker wire.
Not quite textbook Atmos but it gets you most of the way there. They're even better with Atmos music, since many movie Atmos soundtracks often use the Atmos speakers sparingly.

 

[Todd Erwin]

You can also try up-firing "Atmos-enabled" speakers in the front. With your low ceilings, they should work fairly well, although not quite as good as in-ceiling speakers.

 

[Hendrik Zefiro]

You could consider mounting speakers on the ceiling. In my listening room, which is not all too big, I used closed speakers (as opposed to bass reflex) on rotatable stands. I think that it sounds great. By the way, I first tried 5.1.2 but found that upgrading to 4 ceiling/height speakers in a 5.1.4 layout rendered more spaciousness and precision. Later on I tried 7.1.4, but found little improvement as compared to 5.1.4.