Any innivative speaker placement ideas???

Black Rat JBJ

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Hi AVF people, I have a dilemma, literally of my own making!
In order to keep the Mrs happy, we're flipping our bungalow and the rear bedrooms are becoming a 9m wide, 7m deep kitchen / diner / living room.
Plans are drawn up, kitchen pretty much designed with a nice L shaped island and the while of the rear of the property is going to be invisidoors... Bit like trifold doors but if you imagine them to be a bit like those sliding puzzles with a piece missing you had when you were a kid.

The issue is, I was planning to have a 7.2.4 set up but I have no idea where to place the rears or one side speaker!
My rears are Klipsch RP 500M and the sides were going to be Klipsch RP 502s

The living room area will be roughly 7m deep by 5m
wide and I've not even picked which wall the TV will go on but either configuration leaves me with the issue of where to put the rears and one of the side speakers.

I could hang the rears from the ceiling, or have them on stands right behind the sofa, I guess, my only saving grace is I can run the cables where ever I want as its not built yet.

The sides however, I'm stumped, other than having one on a stand and putting it away every time I've finished watching a film, which would get tedious after a while.

Any bright ideas to solve my problem out there???
 

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One solution, which might be the best, is as you suggested, to hang the rear/surround speakers. Aiming downwards to just above head height.

If the rears/surround need to be on the sliding doors side, then you could have them on the side above the sliding doors, again, angled downwards.
 
Personally, I'd give up trying for a full Atmos setup in an open plan setting like that with hard edges and stick to a 5.1 setup with 3 good in-wall LCR speakers up front.

As for surrounds…

1) A fairly small but efficent 'architectural looking' speaker (something like the Genelec 8010 in white) on a ceiling pole/mount and go for more of a commercial/retail look. Finding the right looking speaker/mount combination will be crucial here, anything too hi-fi looking will stick out like a sore thumb in that space, I think you need to look for something that you’d expect to find in an architectural designed open plan space.

2) A motorised/angled ceiling speaker like the KEF CI series.

I don't think you'd be able to use these effectively as a Atmos base layer along with in-ceilings, so I'd stick to 5.1 or 7.1 at most if going this route.

3) A pair of plain old in-ceiling speakers with a pivoting tweeter like a Monitor Audio CP-CT380IDC.

Not ideal, but given you have to live in the space and — I assume — want to keep a sleek/minimal look it may be the best compromise. Realistically 5.1 is probably your maximum in this kind of setup. I'd put any saving towards better in-wall speakers for your LCR channels and/or an additional sub (or even some room correction software, which may help a bit with the acoustics in that space).
 
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Agree with the above - stick with 5.1 I think.
 

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