The Best Home Theater Speaker Placement
Jessi Janae
If you're designing and building a home movie theater, you need to think about creating a fantastic sound environment with your home theater speaker placement. You'll find that five speakers and a subwoofer are standard with most surround sound systems.
The best sound systems make you feel like you're really part of the action; to achieve this, you need to properly set up speakers both in front of and behind the listeners. If you wanted to be really thorough, you could do calculations on the physics and sound waves involved.
However, it doesn't have to be that complicated. If you have the basic idea, you can play around with the placement until you find out what works best in your situation.
Just remember that unless your room has perfect acoustics (and it almost certainly doesn't), you are not going to have a perfect surround sound system. Don't fret too much about it, and don't demand perfection when your room makes it impossible.
Although you can get valuable information from the manufacturer's guidelines and instructions, you should trust your own ears to judge whether your home theater speaker placement works for you.
Center channel speaker -- The center channel speaker should be centered just beneath the screen. This will output on-screen sound such as conversations, so for the sake of realism you will want it very close to the television.
Front left and right speakers -- When you're sitting down, these speakers should be just about ear level. Of course if you're tight on space, you could place them higher and angle them down towards the listener. However, this won't give you the best sound experience.
These speakers play movie soundtracks and handle the split stereo sound of your music. The speakers should be placed equidistant from the listener as the center channel speaker, so the three front speakers form an arc when viewed from above.
Surround speakers -- These speakers should be positioned right behind the listener to the right and left. They will be a good deal higher than the other speakers, approximately ear level when standing.
You can play around with them even more if they come with adjustable brackets or stands. Try pointing them at the rear walls. The sound that results when it bounces off the walls can be astoundingly realistic.
Before you Build a Home Theater be sure to check out our Home Theater Set Up and Home Theater Decor.
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