9's at the rear without doubt..

If you're getting into acoustic lenses, having them all-round sounds much better than mixing them with non-ALT's in my opinion.

I had BL5's with BL3's at the rear with a BV9 and it sounded amazing.  So BL5's and BL9's at the rear.. Wow!!

Last week I acquired myself a 7-55.  May i just say what an absolutely amazing TV it is !!  You have a superb setup - better than mine.  I'm envious!

Lee

🙂

Thanks! I am talking to dealer about bringing the 5s for an in home demo.

That's like having the baker bring a bite of cake for an in-mouth demo. 

😕

I am very curious to see, or should I say hear, how much difference I notice between 5s and 9s with the sources and volumes I listen to.

And then maybe try both the 9s and 1s as rears.

Have to agree with Lee - go for all-ALT.

With 5's at the front, I replaced my BL4000's with BL3's and the clarity was amazing. I then replaced the BL3's with BL9's and the improvement to the sound image was unbeliveable: better staging, improved clarity - but above all so much more punch in the bass region and the improvement to the mid range when watching movies was almost funny.

I know the range pretty well, but was rather surprised by the effect the BL9's had as rear speakers - they should have been an overkill as rear speakers. So I have stopped laughing at those with 4x BL5's in their setups 😁

Roger

Having broken down a lot of surround sound mixes, you'd be surprised what often gets sent to the rear speakers! 70% of the time there isn't really much going on below 150 Hz (ie, not much bass at all), but occasionally you get really full-range content!

House of Flying Daggers springs to mind. When you play the bean-throwing scene on a 5.0 system with full range speakers all around the effect is spectacular. Using a subwoofer is cheating!

The only potential issue with BeoLab 9s as rear speakers is whether they're high enough to get over the top of the sofa. Ideally, the tweeters should be slightly higher than ear-height, which you can see is difficult to do with BeoLab 9s! 😂

Alex wrote:

The only potential issue with BeoLab 9s as rear speakers is whether they're high enough to get over the top of the sofa. Ideally, the tweeters should be slightly higher than ear-height, which you can see is difficult to do with BeoLab 9s! 😂

That was my concern which is why I was wondering if my Beolab 1s might be better as rears. Height verses ALT I guess is the question.

Alex wrote:

Having broken down a lot of surround sound mixes, you'd be surprised what often gets sent to the rear speakers! 70% of the time there isn't really much going on below 150 Hz (ie, not much bass at all), but occasionally you get really full-range content!

House of Flying Daggers springs to mind. When you play the bean-throwing scene on a 5.0 system with full range speakers all around the effect is spectacular. Using a subwoofer is cheating!

 

The only potential issue with BeoLab 9s as rear speakers is whether they're high enough to get over the top of the sofa. Ideally, the tweeters should be slightly higher than ear-height, which you can see is difficult to do with BeoLab 9s! 😂

Very much agreed.  Dolby specs actually call for five full range speakers all around in a surround sound setup, plus an separate LFE effects channel; using smaller rear surrounds, usually crossing over at 80hz to the sub to allow the rear channels lower bass to be reproduced along with the LFE is 'permissible' - BUT as Alex points out, full range speakers all around certainly have their benefits and is the setup of choice if finances and space permits.  Certainly I prefer to run all my speakers set as large in a surround sound setup - unless you cross over at 80hz or lower (which means a decent size speaker anyway), bass can be directional, and stereo bass in the rears is preferable to 'mono' bass coming from up front from a subwoofer doing double duty for LFE and bass from the rear surrounds.  I'd also opinion that by removing bass management with crossovers etc re setting all speakers to large, the overall sound detail and transient response improves as well - perhaps because of phase or other issues involved in the crossover process.

I have heard a movie demo of Beolab 5's as fronts, 9's as surrounds, and 3's as back surrounds in a 7.1 setup (really 7.2 using the speakers in the lab 5's for the LFE, and the sound was far and away the best movie sound I've ever heard - including much vaunted specialist movie surround sound setups such as M&K THX systems etc.

So, very much with Alex on this one

Best regards

John... 🙂

Go for BL1's as rears. Almost every sofa will be higher than the BL9 acoustic lense, their height is just not enough. I've used BL3 as rears but switched to BL1's due to the same problem. On the other hand, BL9 at rears are overkill for 95% of the movie material. BL9 are designed to be front speakers.