Reply To: Beosound Theatre + 2 Beolab 8

[brian.lillo]

Over the past few months I’ve added 10 additional speakers and a subwoofer to my Theatre setup (now 7.1.4).  I’ve been playing around with speaker placement and testing different assigned speaker roles and I have some thoughts to share on the original question posted here:

• Now that I’ve added the two Beolab 8s as front speakers, should I disable the left and right channels of the Beosound Theatre? Or should I assign them to take on the role of the center channel?  My main concern is whether disabling them would be a bit of a waste. And if I don’t disable them—whether keeping them as left/right or assigning them to the center channel—would that cause any conflict with the Beolab 8s, possibly affecting the overall sound quality and performance?

Adding external front speakers has definitely “widened” the front sound stage.  Not wanting 10 of the 12 Theatre speakers to go to waste, I initially tried doubling up the front left/right speakers by assigning those roles both to the Theatre and external front speakers.  For moving watching, this setup doesn’t seem to change the sound much to me (it’s neither a negative or a positive change), but for listening to music I found that this configuration actually made music sound slightly worse.  I’m not sure if that configuration was causing some type of sound cancelation or not, but I quickly stopped assigning multiple front left/right speaker roles.

I do find that assigning the Centre speaker role to the Theatre’s Left Front-firing, Centre Front-firing and Right Front-Firing speakers provides a better center channel experience in my room.  With those 8 speakers assigned to the Centre role, I find the sound to be more impactful and voices are clearer when watching movies.

I ended up assigning the Theatre’s Left Side-firing and Right Side-Firing to the L and R front speaker roles to help widen my front soundstage even more.  For my room, adding these additional speakers to the L and R front speaker roles has improved the sound and widened it even more, but that may be because of my room setup.  I have my Theatre setup in a corner of my family room.  That corner is not a standard 90 degree corner, it is a bit wider at 124 degrees, so there isn’t as direct of a reflection as there would be in a more standard room.

Even though I have 4 ceiling mounted height speakers I ended up assigning the Theatre’s Left and Right Up-firing speakers to the L & R Front Height speaker roles, doubling up those assignments with 2 of my external height speakers.  In the two primary seating positions that I measured from, these additional assignments don’t make any noticeable difference to the sound, but in the farthest left/right seating positions they do help deliver the front heigh audio.  I think this only helps my room setup because my seating positions span just over 20 feet in width.  The two primary seating positions are in the center of that 20 foot span and I have the four LCR ceiling mounted speakers aligned to direct sound right in the middle of those two primary seating positions.

So far I’m very happy with this 7.1.4 setup.  Watching movies with good ATMOS tracks is an incredibly immersive experience.  I’ve also found this setup is exceptional for music listening, especially with all the ATMOS enabled audio tracks available on Tidal.