Placing Speakers on their sides (1 Viewer)

[EricHaas]

Today I received via freight the Paradigm Titans that I am using for rears. The wife is requiring me to wall mount them, and the guy I bought them from sent me the appropriate Paradigm brackets for doing so. Problem is, wall space it limited as the rear wall is mostly a sliding glass door with some blinds. The Titans are larger than I anticipated. Anyway, I have one decent option, turning them on theirs *sides* (rectangular speakers) and mounting them in the space above the curtain rod. Is there any rule that you cannot mount speakers on their sides, or upside down for that matter? I am not asking if this will be optimum acoustically, just whether it will TOTALLY screw up the acoustics.

 

[Marc H]

Absolutely no problem.

The only thing is that you will find the bass a bit louder like that.

Might get a bit of corner loading effect depending on the distance to the ceiling.

Place them with the tweeters to the inside.

 

[EricHaas]

OK, I will probably plug the ports too. People say that Titans are a bit boomy when placed near a wall without the ports plugged. Thanks for the quick feedback!

Any other opinions are also welcome.

 

[Kevin C Brown]

Eric- If possible, you might want to try and listen to them vertically and then horizontally.

Center channels in general are badly designed. Suffer from "lobing" and unequal freq response as you go further left and right from the center "sweet" spot.

You might get the same effect by positioning your surrounds that way.

 

[EricHaas]

Kevin:
OK, I'll give it a demo that way. Good idea. You should stop by my place and help me out since I live in Foster City. Just kidding.

 

[PatrickM]

Eric,

I agree with Kevin about experimenting since vertically oriented speakers have a wide horizontal dispersion and a limited vertical dispersion which means that if you place a speaker on its side you will get reflections off the roof and may have a very narrow horizontal sweet spot.

Patrick

 

[EricHaas]

Yeah that makes sense. Due to spousal issues, I have to mount them this way. But I will see if the brackets permit me to angle them downward. This should help curb that wide horizantal disperson causing the sound to reflect off the ceiling. Not much I can do about the narrower sweet spot, but these are replacing a pair of tiny JBL cubes, so I can't imagine that the rear soundstage won't widen even with me having to mount them this way. Wish I had more room to work with, but we have to make due.

 

[joe logston]

that gose for your center channel speaker to stand it up and hear the differance a better sound stage all round cleaner sound try it thank you, joe

 

[John S Smith]

Patrick I can't get my head around this, if the driver is round why would it disperse more in one plane than the other? Surely the proximity of the ceiling to the speaker is the important factor here and Eric is addressing this problem by canting his speakers downwards. If his only choices are with the speaker hard up to the cieling, vertical or horizontal would make little difference. (Presumably the tweeter would be in approximately the same position, relative to the ceiling). I thought Marc H covered the question admirably.

 

[EricHaas]

Yeah, thing is I have heard this said before about center channel speakers. Some people do not like them because speakers are supposed to put out a wider dispersion off-axis. So some say the center has a narrow sweet spot because of this. That would obviously apply to any speaker placed on its side as well. But you're right, drivers are symmetrical (round). The only difference when you place it on its side is the position of the enclosure. Certainly with a square box like most subs or some satellite speakers it can't make a difference. But it shouldn't with rectangular speakers either. I'm perplexed.

Any other input is appreciated. The speakers are going up this Saturday.

 

[PatrickM]

if the driver is round why would it disperse more in one plane than the other?

Yes, the drivers do appear to be round but speakers are designed to have wide horizontal dispersion and limited vertical dispersion. In THX certified speakers the vertical dispersion is limited even more than normal speakers as per the THX specification. The exact design reasons I can't give you but if you look around you will find out that a typical speaker dispersion pattern is as I have said.

Therefore, putting the side of a speaker close to a wall (in this case the ceiling) will cause an undesired reflection.

Patrick

 

[EricHaas]

OK, thanks. I will angle them down quite a bit actually, to the point where they are very nearly 45 degrees from the wall instead of 90. That should minimize the reflection. Also, these are surrounds, so I doubt I will notice what little problem remains.

 

[Jon_R]

you could remount the tweeters to compensate for their new orientation. Might void a warranty or two, but you might be able to do it without doing any damage at all as well.

If you were to rotate the tweeter about 90 degrees clockwise and set the speaker on its side w/ the tweeters inward that would then put the tweeter at a very similar angle to its original orientation.

Just something to think about.

However, I'd just try it.

If you know the brackets have to be above the curtain rod, put them up there and give it a listen. IF it blows then work with it, otherwise you're all set.

Good luck,

Jon

 

[EricHaas]

Jon, believe it or not, you actually can't remove the grills from the Titans. I suppose what you are proposing is possible, but it would make me squeamish.

 

[Quentin]

What about placing mains on their sides? I'm looking at buying Axiom M22TiSe's, but the bookshelf I would place them on is not tall enough (they're 20" tall).

There is no ceiling interference to worry about, but the speakers themselves seem vertically designed - 20" tall with two woofers. Will I be ok with them on their side?

 

[PatrickM]

You'll get the same issues with any vertically aligned array of drivers. The horizontal dispersion is greater/wider than the vertical dispersion. You'll probably end up with a very narrow sweet spot once you toe in your speakers.

The differences can be checked out with any set of bookshelf/tower speakers and their associated center channel. Even though the bookshelf/towers have the same driver compliments as the center the horizontally aligned center channels don't neccesarily timbre match as much as you'd think. Play pink noise across the front speakers and you'll notice a tonal change.

Patrick

 

[Brian Bunge]

Patrick is absolutely correct. This is what most speaker companies do: Take an MTM-style speaker, rotate it 90 degrees, call it a center channel. Absolutely the worst thing you can do. Rotating the tweeter 90 degrees will not change the fact that the tweeter is still horizontally aligned with the woofer. A "center channel" is strictly a marketing/aesthetic necessity. Most people are not physically capable of mounting a center speaker vertically. But if you can, it will make a huge difference in your soundstage.

This has to do with the way sound waves behave. Since most speakers are taller than wide, the sound waves "wrap around" the sides of the enclosure and will actually reflect off the baffle, side and rear walls (behind the speaker) of the room. Simply taking a current speaker and widening the front baffle will affect the sound. That's why you see so many narrow, deep enclosures. You get better dispersion and less diffraction off the front baffle with a narrower enclosure. Turn it on it's side and you've totally changed the sound.

Brian

 

[ChrisMM]

The wife is requiring me to ...

I hate when that happens. But what choice do we get?

 

[joe logston]

i got polk cs-400i i been puting it vertical for over a yr. now thats the only way you can get good sound out of a center channel speaker is run it vertical, you got to move it around a little, set your delay 2 ms in the center channel you got to play around with it till right. thanks, joe