Is it possible to use Atmos upward firing speakers as a 5.1 rear?

Muzzar69

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Hi Folks,

I've been wanting to set up a little home theatre for a long time now but I've always held off because the room I use is really small and I sit right against the back wall so there is no room for rear speakers and I'm renting so I'm not allowed to wall mount anything.

I finally pulled the trigger last week and bought a Marantz SR5010, Paradigm Centre 3, Paradigm Monitor 9 series 7 and a Qsonic subwoofer. Really happy with it so far, but I can't help but worry I'm missing out on not having rear speakers for the traditional 5.1/7.1 setup. So I'm wondering if there would be any solutions of getting a 5.1 setup without having to have speakers behind me. Space at the front is limited so I don't really want to add more bookshelf speakers at the front.

I was thinking now with the upward firing speakers configured for Dolby Atmos configurations would it be possible to use the upward firing modules that sit on the left and right floor standing speakers in place of the traditional rear speakers? Would the receiver see those as normal rear speakers and send the normal signal to them or would it only send atmos specific applications to them? Obviously unfortunately theres not much atmos content out there just yet so it would be a bit of a waste to go and buy them if only specific atmos coded titles will work with them. Also I mainly use it for playing games, and ASAIK game systems don't even support atmos yet? I do watch some movies from time to time but the 16:9 ratios of todays TVs and the cinema scope of movies, thus cutting the image and having those ugly black bars throughout the whole movie drives me bat.... crazy so I tend to not watch movies so often.........

So in short can anyone give some advice on what solution I could look into for obtaining a good 5.1 HT, or would I be better off just forgetting it and sticking to my current 3.1 setup?

Thanks for the advice!
 
Another option is to have normal standmount speakers placed on their back facing upwards either side of the sofa. I configured my dads system that way for a while due to him not having stands and not wanting to have brackets on the wall. It worked surprisingly well and better than having the rear effects playing from the front (even if directed towards the ceiling).
 
Thanks, I'll look into that. Another thing I was thinking was getting the Paradigm Surround 3 instead.

I'm tossing up whether it's worth me moving to a different room for this which is a lot wider but not as deep. My current room I only have about 4m from the left and right walls and maybe 6 from the front and back so putting a pair of the surrounds in there might be a bit of a squeeze too close to your ears. The other room though is maybe the exact oposite, width wise maybe 6 depth wise maybe 4. Would I be better off using the wider room, or the deeper room?

And if I'm to go with the wider room I could probably fit my current monitor 9s as rears and get the monitor 11s as fronts? Or would I still be better off using the surround 3?
 
If the rooms are the same dimensions why not just move the current room around so you have the width as 6m?
It is generally not recommended that you use floorstanders as rears since they tend to be too low (surrounds ideally should be 30cm above ear level when seated). Hence the surround 3 would be a better option especially if the sofa is close to the rear wall.
 
Scratch that, finally found a tape measure. My current room is 2900CM wide by 3100 CM deep. The room I'm thinking of moving to is 4000CM wide to 2700CM deep
 
If the rooms are the same dimensions why not just move the current room around so you have the width as 6m?
It is generally not recommended that you use floorstanders as rears since they tend to be too low (surrounds ideally should be 30cm above ear level when seated). Hence the surround 3 would be a better option especially if the sofa is close to the rear wall.

There not the same dimensionally. Ones wider where the other is deeper. Ones my bed room the one I currently use, the other is the study room where we use to have the computer printer and filing cabinets for when we owned our own business the misses did her accounting in there.

Ok fair enough surround 3 it is. Cheaper too :')
 
If one is 6m x 4m and the other 4m x 6m then they are the same size dimensionally. The only difference is which one you call the width and which the length (or which way you are facing in the room).
 
yeah that was a bad guestimation by me i was way off. I've been turning the house upside-down the past week looking for the blooming tape measure just found it now. Actual room dimensions I popped in my third post.
 
The millennia ADP look really cool too, wonder what price I could get them down to.......
 

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