Wayne Parham Messages: 18789 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
Left and right mains should flank the video screen, and be at the same vertical height as the screen. The center channel should be centered and at the same height as the screen. That's only possible of the screen is acoustically transparent, so some people use a wide but short speaker placed below the screen. I would personally not do this, because it is a highly compromised configuration - you can't make a good speaker that way - so I'd rather have a phantom center using constant directivity left/right mains towed-in to cross axes in front of the listening area.
Surrounds should be placed slightly above ear level at the sides of the listening area. Rear surrounds, if used, should be placed behind the listeners and to each side. They should be at the same height as the left/right surrounds.
Use multiple subwoofers rather than a single sub. I like to use a pair of flanking subs and a pair of distributed multisubs. What that means is to put a subwoofer slightly beside, behind and below each of the mains, and send it an 80Hz to 100Hz second-order low-passed signal of the main speaker it is flanking. Then put two subs far from the mains, back by the the surrounds. The signal can be from the LFE channel or a signal derived from all channels summed and fourth-order low-passed between 50Hz and 80Hz.