surround orientation (1 Viewer)

[PeterK]

I just discovered today that if I lay my surround speakers on their backs facing up instead of pointing them directly at my sitting area is gives them a more diffused sound. It's harder to tell where the sound is coming from. Is this not the goal of dipolar speakers. I just thought it was neat how changing the way a speaker faces changes the sound so much!!

 

[Brian L]

Yup, in the days of Pro Logic, I read recommendations to do just that if you had room layout issues. Due to the layout of my room, my center rear is set exactly that way, and it works pretty well at creating a decent amout of rear envelopement.

Now, for movie soundtracks, some of the surround content is intended to provide ambience, while there are also discrte sounds panned to the left or right. For ambience, diffuse sound is good, but for discrete sounds, you don't want as much diffusion.

As for surround music, some is mixed where the rears are doing just ambience, and other stuff has hard panned intrumentation in the rears.

I tend to favor having my surrounds on stands, a bit behind me and to the sides. Dolby has a white paper regarding setting up a 5.1 music mixing suite that offers that sugegstion. I find that this still works very well for film, and is superior for music, particularly with lots of discrete rear channel sounds.

BGL