I need some help on whether this setup works and which of the speaker placement options would be best from an acoustics perspective (for both hifi stereo listening and AV purposes).
Ok, we're keen to move and have found a possible house. It benefits from a family room on the bottom of three storeys (which has no other rooms apart from a double garage and a bathroom/drying room). A small cupboard next to the family room could work well as an AV/server hub.
We haven't put an offer in for the house yet, but we're seriously considering it. As part of our diligence process, I want to test out how the family room could be set up as a multipurpose "family" room / AV room combo. It opens out onto the garden so will definitely be an entertaining room, even though the formal rooms (sitting room, dining room) are upstairs and open onto first floor decking. The sitting room won't have a TV in it - it and the dining room will just have a Sonos-type audio player (make/kit to be determined).
So, back to the family room: it's a bit too nearly-square for my liking, especially when we block off the end of the room with heavy curtains - partly to black out the light and partly for acoustic reasons. Hopefully the fact that the rear "wall" is actually sound absorbant curtaining (with dead space behind) helps?
The big issue, though, is speaker placement. I realise in an ideal world, they'd be just slightly closer together than an equilateral triangle would imply. Unfortunately, there's a hulking great door in the way, which means we either end up with them quite far apart (greater than the distance to the listener and a 75 degree angle between them), or move them closer together, the other side of the door, which means only a 35 degree angle between them.
All speakers will be wall-mounted with as sturdy wallmounts as I can manage to find and blend in. We'll be ripping off the wall with the TV/projector on in order to run cables etc and will be doing the same to the ceiling, for lighting and cable runs to the surround speakers. While we're at that, we may as well run additional cabling conduits and cabling for potential ceiling speakers and a rear additional pair of surrounds for 7.1 rather than just 5.1. We might eventually consider a full 7.2.4 Atmos system using our existing sub and perhaps a funky infinite baffle job with drivers in the garage - all fun thinking about it!
The downside is the current flooring is laminate, which is the worst possible. So a large, thick pile rug will need to go down covering as much of the floor area as possible.
Additional acoustic treatment would probably be done on a bit-by-bit basis, using wife-friendly "picture boards", either DIY using a loose-weave canvas covering rockwool boards mounted inside a softwood frame. I think we could get away with beanbag-type corner traps - basically giant beanbag coverings but with cheap hollowfibre duvets inside, instead of closed-cell foam beans. We have young kids, so they'd love to jump on those and we can put them back in the corners when we want "AV time". I'd plan to build in ceiling panels too, possibly even using the void full of rockwool with an acoustically transparent/foam/grill covering for those areas where we won't have lights etc. Plenty of options as we'll be taking off the existing plasterboard.
Below is a diagram of our intented setup, with the couple of options we have for speaker placement. One could suggest swivelling the whole setup around 90 degrees, so the front wall is the fireplace. But, this creates two problems: one with where the centre speaker goes and the consequent height of the screen above the fireplace and secondly with the right wall being curtain (with dead space behind) vs the left wall being conventional. I can't imagine that would lead to ideal acoustics?
Ok, we're keen to move and have found a possible house. It benefits from a family room on the bottom of three storeys (which has no other rooms apart from a double garage and a bathroom/drying room). A small cupboard next to the family room could work well as an AV/server hub.
We haven't put an offer in for the house yet, but we're seriously considering it. As part of our diligence process, I want to test out how the family room could be set up as a multipurpose "family" room / AV room combo. It opens out onto the garden so will definitely be an entertaining room, even though the formal rooms (sitting room, dining room) are upstairs and open onto first floor decking. The sitting room won't have a TV in it - it and the dining room will just have a Sonos-type audio player (make/kit to be determined).
So, back to the family room: it's a bit too nearly-square for my liking, especially when we block off the end of the room with heavy curtains - partly to black out the light and partly for acoustic reasons. Hopefully the fact that the rear "wall" is actually sound absorbant curtaining (with dead space behind) helps?
The big issue, though, is speaker placement. I realise in an ideal world, they'd be just slightly closer together than an equilateral triangle would imply. Unfortunately, there's a hulking great door in the way, which means we either end up with them quite far apart (greater than the distance to the listener and a 75 degree angle between them), or move them closer together, the other side of the door, which means only a 35 degree angle between them.
All speakers will be wall-mounted with as sturdy wallmounts as I can manage to find and blend in. We'll be ripping off the wall with the TV/projector on in order to run cables etc and will be doing the same to the ceiling, for lighting and cable runs to the surround speakers. While we're at that, we may as well run additional cabling conduits and cabling for potential ceiling speakers and a rear additional pair of surrounds for 7.1 rather than just 5.1. We might eventually consider a full 7.2.4 Atmos system using our existing sub and perhaps a funky infinite baffle job with drivers in the garage - all fun thinking about it!
The downside is the current flooring is laminate, which is the worst possible. So a large, thick pile rug will need to go down covering as much of the floor area as possible.
Additional acoustic treatment would probably be done on a bit-by-bit basis, using wife-friendly "picture boards", either DIY using a loose-weave canvas covering rockwool boards mounted inside a softwood frame. I think we could get away with beanbag-type corner traps - basically giant beanbag coverings but with cheap hollowfibre duvets inside, instead of closed-cell foam beans. We have young kids, so they'd love to jump on those and we can put them back in the corners when we want "AV time". I'd plan to build in ceiling panels too, possibly even using the void full of rockwool with an acoustically transparent/foam/grill covering for those areas where we won't have lights etc. Plenty of options as we'll be taking off the existing plasterboard.
Below is a diagram of our intented setup, with the couple of options we have for speaker placement. One could suggest swivelling the whole setup around 90 degrees, so the front wall is the fireplace. But, this creates two problems: one with where the centre speaker goes and the consequent height of the screen above the fireplace and secondly with the right wall being curtain (with dead space behind) vs the left wall being conventional. I can't imagine that would lead to ideal acoustics?