It's your room, so you can do what you want (subject to the wife's approval
), but the real question is whether the effort will be reward with decent performance.
The advice on speaker placement isn't some fuddy-duddy old-school idea. It's trying to replicate how the sound mixing studios are set up and fit that in to a domestic living space. Side and rear surrounds were never meant to be ear height for exactly the reason about blocking "sight" lines. Look for a clue to commercial cinema screens. The surrounds are all above head height for this very reason. But while you're there, also take a note of where the speakers
are not positioned. They are not up at the highest point of the walls. They are certainly not up in the corners of the room.
Mixing studios and cinema rooms both have what the average domestic room does not;
space.
Space allows sound to spread and to integrate. Look at the examples of room layouts from
Dolby or the mixing studios
here, and
here. The 'money' rooms are all enormous by typical British housing standards. Even where the side/rear speakers are shown at (or close to) ear height, there's still some distance for the sound to propagate in to the listening space.
It's one of the reasons why Hi-Fi speakers don't work so well sat on a table top within touching distance of the listener. The sound from the tweeter is very directional. It requires a certain distance for that sound to spread wide enough that it integrates with the mid/woofer. A different kind of speaker is required for very close listening distances. This is the nearfield monitor. It has drivers with a wider dispersion so that a stereo image can be formed at a much shorter listening distance. (Nearfield monitors are also used for specific tasks such as listening to midrange or replicating the limited range of the average car stereo/small radio; but that's a whole other set of stories.)
Now think about all the companies selling surround speakers. How many make specific nearfield monopole monitor speakers for side/rear surrounds? Can you think of any? I can't. What the vast majority do is take the smallest of their speaker range and label it as suitable for surround duties. In some cases it works. In others it's just too damned close to be effective and convincing. It's like having someone distracting you all the way through a film. Bloody annoying after the novelty has worn off.
Historically, the closest we've got to something that works well in small spaces is dipole surround speakers. These are speakers with tweeters facing in opposite directions and that are wired out of phase with each other. For a small space they make a diffuse sound field that better replicates the multiple surround speakers fitted around a large cinema viewing room. [Bipoles are the other type of dual-direction firing speaker. They're less diffuse and they're better suited a 7.1 arrangement of sides + rears where more rear effects steering is required.]
The goal posts shifted though with ATMOS. The way it works is based on sound objects rather than sound fields. In visual terms, it's the difference between a painting and a
collage. From a distance they look the same. But with a picture, the closer you get the harder it is to pick out individual images. With a collage, the closer you get destroys the 'whole picture' illusion and you focus instead on the individual elements. Thinking about sound now, for this illusion to work when you stand back, it requires precision from each of the speakers in creating the hundreds of individual sound objects that ATMOS supports, and more than that, precision in the way that each of the surround speakers must work in harmony to move that object within the 3D space of a home cinema system.
This brings us back to speaker placement in rooms.
Corners are bad places for speakers. Pure and simple. Yes, it might look neat and get big WAF (wife approval factor), but acoustically it's a disaster. The two main problems are the room edges and corners in particular are bass congregation zones, and they have two or three closely positioned adjacent faces for the undiluted sound to create first reflections.
Did you ever see the Bruce Lee film,
Enter the Dragon? There's a part toward the end where Bruce is fighting the main baddy, and he escapes in to a room filled with mirrors. Bruce can't tell where the guy is because of all the false reflections. Well, sound works in pretty much the same wat. Put a speaker some place where the side walls are close and you'll get several false image reflections from the speaker. It smears the sound and wrecks the precision. Keep your speakers away from room edges and corners.
If you've got a sub that will go high enough to blend with them, have a look at the Cambridge Audio Minx. They're very small, and they have wide dispersal. Put one over the door and the other on the opposite wall to match.
