New 5.1 Setup

Alien18 · 22 Jun 2006 at 14:02

Hi All,

Yesterday I ordered some nice 5.1 speakers (Creative Inspire T6060) and am trying to plan ahead the locations of each speaker.

I've just thrown together a very rough floor plan of my room. It's here, please don't laugh too much - I'm at work and only have Paint to play with.

The yellow block is my chair facing towards the corner and the blue block is my sexy monitor :cool:

.

I'm planning on getting some wall mounts for the speakers and the sub woofer will go under the desk by my feet.

So the centre speaker will be mounted just above my monitor and the front left & right will be mounted at ear level pointed towards me.

My main problem is the placement of the back speakers. They will both be higher up in the room (level with each other). At the moment as you can see im thinking of putting one above my window and one above my bed.

I know that the drawing isn't to scale or anything, but it's close enough for me to tell you that the back speakers are probably gonna be more than the recommended 100-120degrees around. Will that make much difference?

Also, I think the wardrobe might affect the Rear Left speaker.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

Alien18 · 22 Jun 2006 at 17:11

Can no one offer any help or advice please? :begs:

Rokusho · 22 Jun 2006 at 22:44

TBH unless your a complete audiophile, i wouldn't worry about it. As long as you dont run outta wire, your good!

fish99 · 22 Jun 2006 at 22:56

Dead link on the floorplan?

Alien18 · 23 Jun 2006 at 08:48

Cool, thanks for your help. I measured the amount of cable I need so i'll be buying some extensions this weekend.

The link shouldn't be dead - working fine for me.

fish99 · 23 Jun 2006 at 09:28

Ah right, it works if I cut and paste the address but not if I click on it.

Anyway, if that's the best you can do then it'll just have to do, that is a small room and you're obviously very limited about where you can put stuff. Of course ideally you would want the rear speakers the same distance behind you (and closer), and the fronts a bit wider apart maybe, but there really is no way of doing that in such a limited space.

If your soundcard has a speaker calibration utility with it, you can adjust the volumes and timings to try to make up for some of those problems.

I used the Logitech X530 which are pretty similar to the T6060 power-wise and the only problem with these sort of low power speaker sets is - the rears can be a bit too quiet and you can lose their sound. The T6060 centre is twice the power of the other satellites too, which unbalances the soundfield - you've got 34W of speaker in about three foot of space at the front, and then two 8W speakers basically on their own and they tend to get drowned out. Speaker calibration is your best bet for fixing that.

One other thing, when you say the right rear will be above your window, do you mean near the ceiling, cause their sound might be lost even more up there. If you can somehow point them down towards your listenning position that will help a bit.