# Towers for Height Channels?



## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

I just purchased a lovely pair of Klipsch RP-160M's, and they are spectacular! These were going to be used for the front Height (Atmos) channels.

But we have a pair of very good tower speakers (BIC DV84's), and is there any reason why they can't be used for the Atmos channels? We have plenty of room, and they can be mounted pretty high on the wall. Near the ceiling.

I will experiment with both speaker sets later today.

What do you say?


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## willis7469 (Jan 31, 2014)

Well if you can get them into the right spots... yes. Seems like the RP’s would be soooo much easier to get there. Plus, the content won’t lend itself to the benefits of towers. Also, how would you do this?


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

willis7469 said:


> Well if you can get them into the right spots... yes. Seems like the RP’s would be soooo much easier to get there. Plus, the content won’t lend itself to the benefits of towers. Also, how would you do this?


The towers could go on a sturdy, bracket braced shelf. The walls in the front of the theater are fairly tall and they could fit one of three ways...

1. Placed on the wall vertically, as is standard flanking the screen and drapes.
2. Placed on the wall next to the ceiling, "head-to-head" horizontally. They would be separated by the screen and curtains, of course.
3. Placed vertically in the corners, at the 45 degree angle from the seating position.

The RP-160M's could be placed similarly, in the corner, or on the sides of the screen.

The advantage of the towers is the present a huge sound stage. Even though the content does not require a speaker of the size and build, the audio content very well may benefit from a tower.

Found some info online concerning placement of front height speakers, saying they should be in the corners, as close to the ceiling as possible.

I will experiment later this afternoon.


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## willis7469 (Jan 31, 2014)

Oleson said:


> The towers could go on a sturdy, bracket braced shelf. The walls in the front of the theater are fairly tall and they could fit one of three ways...
> 
> 1. Placed on the wall vertically, as is standard flanking the screen and drapes.
> 2. Placed on the wall next to the ceiling, "head-to-head" horizontally. They would be separated by the screen and curtains, of course.
> ...




Could you post a picture of the front of the room? Sometimes a picture can say a LOT! 
FWIW, I am an advocate for tower speakers. I won’t bore you but I am. However, the huge soundstage can also be presented by a nice speaker to. It comes down to having wide/narrow directivity. 
For placing the towers sideways, I would be concerned that they don’t have much natural vertical dispersion. This would mean that placed sideways, they would have two narrow beams and wouldn’t cover laterally very well. 
Not sure of the goal either. If your trying to do. PLIIZ height configuration I’d flank the screen as said. Iirc the spec for pliiz is to place the height speakers directly above the mains by about 3’. I would do the same for x.x.2 Atmos height. If my memory serves, the corner installation is for Auro3d and works well for dtsx. Auro is basically DOA in the US so I wouldn’t factor that in to the equation. Also, dtsx works very well with Atmos locations. 
So, for an experiment today, I say put them up and experiment. But if you’re going to update the processor for immersive, go in ceiling. Or at least on ceiling. 
I noticed you posted Dolby’s installation guide. I assume you’ve been reading? It’s good reading.


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

In ceiling is not really an option. Yes, the AV Pre-Pro will be upgraded soon...depending on my results today with the speaker placement.

Now that it is not necessary to buy a new blu-ray player (current DMP-UB900), that money can be diverted to a new Integra preamp.


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## willis7469 (Jan 31, 2014)

Oleson said:


> In ceiling is not really an option. Yes, the AV Pre-Pro will be upgraded soon...depending on my results today with the speaker placement.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Interesting. I use Tapatalk for iOS and posting pics takes about 5 seconds. It’s really nice. Anyway, not a biggie. 
Also, keep in mind that your testing today will be different than an actual immersive test. 
Sorry I don’t recall. We’re you eventually going to do 4 height/top speakers?
Curious. What kind of ceiling installation obstacles do you have?


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

willis7469 said:


> Interesting. I use Tapatalk for iOS and posting pics takes about 5 seconds. It’s really nice. Anyway, not a biggie.
> Also, keep in mind that your testing today will be different than an actual immersive test.
> Sorry I don’t recall. We’re you eventually going to do 4 height/top speakers?
> Curious. What kind of ceiling installation obstacles do you have?


Pictures posted. Spray foam insulation in the ceilings (Like a foam ice chest). Not impossible to deal with, but very difficult. I'm happy with on-wall speakers, even though that may not be what Atmos specifies.

With the speakers in a horizontal install, at the ceiling level, might we get a good deal of off-ceiling-reflection that would approximate the Atmos sound?


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

Here is a good review of the Atmos height speakers being wall mounted, near the ceiling.

https://www.avsforum.com/svs-prime-5-1-4-atmos-speaker-system-review/


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## willis7469 (Jan 31, 2014)

Oleson said:


> Pictures posted. Spray foam insulation in the ceilings (Like a foam ice chest). Not impossible to deal with, but very difficult. I'm happy with on-wall speakers, even though that may not be what Atmos specifies.
> 
> With the speakers in a horizontal install, at the ceiling level, might we get a good deal of off-ceiling-reflection that would approximate the Atmos sound?




First off. Beautiful room. It looks very well done. Couple more questions. It looks like a single pair of side surrounds is that correct? I think that would leave a lot of holes in the coverage. Maybe I just can’t see the others. 
How would you feel about lowering the surrounds? In a traditional implementation such as you have, they are where I’d expect to see them. However with atmos, the more separation between the bed layer and height layer the better it works. Ideally bed layer speakers should be at ear height, or just above. If all the speakers are on, or close to the same plane, the effect is reduced. 
I think the spec is H1(main tweeter height) times 1.25 for H2(surround height). So for a 40” night main tweeter you’d want 50” high surrounds. You can do like 1.5ish and that can be helpful if the seats are always full. 

Can’t say how the reflections off the ceiling will factor for sure. Normally you’d want less of that so the render and speakers can use the XYZ coordinates to place objects properly. Atmos isn’t just about sound from above. 
So yeah, spray foam...NOT fun lol. Looks like you could mount ON the ceiling. But as you know, you can get a pretty good experience with height speakers in the front and rear height spots. 
Did I say nice room?


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

willis7469 said:


> First off. Beautiful room. It looks very well done. Couple more questions. It looks like a single pair of side surrounds is that correct? I think that would leave a lot of holes in the coverage. Maybe I just can’t see the others.
> How would you feel about lowering the surrounds? In a traditional implementation such as you have, they are where I’d expect to see them. However with atmos, the more separation between the bed layer and height layer the better it works. Ideally bed layer speakers should be at ear height, or just above. If all the speakers are on, or close to the same plane, the effect is reduced.
> I think the spec is H1(main tweeter height) times 1.25 for H2(surround height). So for a 40” night main tweeter you’d want 50” high surrounds. You can do like 1.5ish and that can be helpful if the seats are always full.
> 
> ...


First, thank you for your compliments. We built the house ourselves, and the theater got 70% of my attention during the build. Everything from seating position/eyeball position to screen height (we built the screen) was considered.

In addition, we made our own acoustic wall panels. These really made the room near studio quality for sound!

You don't see the full setup as the photos are old. It is a 9.2.2 system now. The rear .2 are simply Dynaquad ambience speakers. They do a very nice job. You have to be over 21 to know what Dynaquad is!

Side surrounds (L+R), rear surrounds (L+R), rear ambience (L+R). Dual subs.

No plans to move any of the speakers from the current locations. 

Hope to get my new in-wall 14 gauge speaker wire soon, so we can experiment with the front height channels. 

Stay tuned!


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

Update: Just set up the RP-150M's as the front height channels, near the corners of the walls in front. This selection has turned my Integra DHC-80.3 9.2 into a 5.2.4 system (sort of).

Two front height, two front wide, L+C+R, two subs, plus the rear L+R surrounds.

Both speaker sets have been tried in the front L+R height channels. Here is the shocker. There has been zero (zero) audio output from these channels, except when all channel stereo is played. Watched part of two movies, Dunkirk (4K) and Sully. Zero audio. None. I even turned off all the amps except for the front height channels. It was like going to a silent movie.

I went through several times in the setup menu, adjusting volumes and distances for all channels and speaker placements.

Total waste of time, and money so far.

Edit: I finally broke the code, as not all modes support all channels. To get the front height channels involved, I selected DTS Neo: X Cinema. And also THX: Cinema.

Still more listening to do, but there is a fair amount of info in those front height channels.


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## Da Wiz (May 8, 2019)

You certainly CAN use tower speakers for height channels, but I wouldn't do it unless the ceiling height was 10.5 feet or more. And if I used towers, I would attach the BASE of the speaker to the ceiling, not the top. That makes the speaker hang "upside down" so the tweeter is lower.

You want SEPARATION of the height speakers from the "low" speakers to get a decent immersive effect--the top of the lower speakers should be at least a few feet below the "bottom" of the top speakers.

Also don't forget that most movies with Atmos or DTS:X soundtracks are absolutely PATHETIC in the height channels because there was no human sound engineer involved in creation of the immersive soundtrack. If it is a Dolby soundtrack, it sounds like they start with the 7.1 soundtrack, run that through Dolby Surround (that sounds HORRIBLE on everything you use it on) to create completely fake immersive sound, then they encode that as an Atmos soundtrack and call it done. Studios hate to spend money if they think they can get away with cheap-shotting something like this. The few discs that do have pretty good immersive soundtracks have clearly had a human at an editing consolde. DTS:X tracks are just as bad, except Neural:X does a better (but only a little better) job of synthesizing channels from 7.1 soundtracks. AuroMatic (the upmixer you get with Auro-3D, makes most Atmos and DTS:X movies sound better if you do NOT use Atmos or DTS:X and instead, use AuroMatic to decode the 7.1 or 5.1 original soundtrack. Of course if you choose a processor that doesn't support Auro-3D, you can't really hear how much better AuroMatic is when the original Atmos or DTS:X soundtrack was done without a sound engineer at the helm.


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## willis7469 (Jan 31, 2014)

Da Wiz said:


> You certainly CAN use tower speakers for height channels, but I wouldn't do it unless the ceiling height was 10.5 feet or more. And if I used towers, I would attach the BASE of the speaker to the ceiling, not the top. That makes the speaker hang "upside down" so the tweeter is lower.
> 
> 
> 
> You want SEPARATION of the height speakers from the "low" speakers to get a decent immersive effect--the top of the lower speakers should be at least a few feet below the "bottom" of the top speakers.



If you want more separation from the bed layer(which I agree with) why would you place the tweeter lower? That’s bassackwards.


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

After further review, doing side-by-side A/B listening tests, the towers proved to be no advantage in the front L&R Height Channels...much to my surprise. I guess that reinforces my review (on another thread) of the overall quality of the Klipsch RP-160M's. 

I will put these on shelves flanking the screen, near the ceiling. The ceiling height in the front of the theater is 10.4 feet.

The angle will be very close to 45 degrees from the central "Sweet Spot" in my theater. But that figure will be different depending on which row of seats you are sitting in, and if you have a middle seat, or an aisle seat.


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## Da Wiz (May 8, 2019)

willis7469 said:


> If you want more separation from the bed layer(which I agree with) why would you place the tweeter lower? That’s bassackwards.


Because the tweeter close to the ceiling would be a dispersion disaster.


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## Oleson M.D. (Feb 3, 2010)

Da Wiz said:


> Because the tweeter close to the ceiling would be a dispersion disaster.


So my RP-160M's will be located up high, with the top of the speaker very near the ceiling (10.4 feet). Does this present a problem?


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## willis7469 (Jan 31, 2014)

Oleson M.D. said:


> So my RP-160M's will be located up high, with the top of the speaker very near the ceiling (10.4 feet). Does this present a problem?



No. It will be fine. 

AND that’s mostly where it’s recommended to place them. SVS recommendations high and to the sides, at about 35° for x.x.2. I wouldn’t worry about where you want to place them up front. Imo, since your surrounds are above the bed layer spec, I think a little farther forward(like where your planning)would be better as not to blend together too much with the surrounds.


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