# Ceiling speaker placement question



## see4real (Sep 2, 2011)

I am rehabbing my home and will have 7.1 in the main living area, as well as ceiling speakers in the dining room and kitchen. My question is about placement in the dining room and kitchen. Not sure which layout is best, so I drew 3 different options on the floor plan. Any suggestions on which setup would be best? Red, green, blue?


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## SAC (Dec 3, 2009)

The answer to your question lies primarily in defining what you are trying to achieve with your plan.

By this I mean that ceiling speakers will NOT recreate your home theater experience. They Will instead create a distributed zoned system with varying degrees of overlap. Here the primary issues tend to be issues of both 'uniformity' of coverage and masking. 

Instead of having a horizontal plane in which you are present and wherein all of the various sources interact with respect to arrival times and gain, you have vertically oriented zones - silos if you will - where one source is dominant and in which this source will tend to mask the additional sources. Pattern organization and coverage entail developing a relationship between: center-to-center overlap, minimum overlap, or no overlap (edge-to-edge) behavior at a designated vertical listening plane (in other words, are you sitting or standing - as the response WILL differ).

For this type of (ceiling) system there are various procedures for determining spacing and gain interaction levels, etc. But they are not oriented toward multi-channel reproduction - a format the geometry simply does not support.There are tables and various design resources used to design such installation. 
But after all is said and done, if your goal is to achieve any semblance of what you imagine to be a 'stereo/multichannel' experience, you will NOT achieve this. And anything other than designing for mono-uniformity will create an incredibly variable experience... as in, imagine someone playing radically with the pan/balance control whose setting will vary dramatically with your relative position to a source.

So, I guess what I am trying to tell you, unless you are willing to make some serious compromises, which include dropping notions of multichannel reproduction and are simply interested in a mono 'public address' style system, I would fore go the ceiling delivery method and most definitely at least go with an in wall horizontally mounted system.

The physics of a ceiling mounted/vertically oriented system simply do not support what many hope to achieve interns of any sort of reasonably effective multichannel reproduction.

I suspect that this is NOT what you want to hear, but it is something a few more builders, in offering such pre-wire 'convenience', should be aware. If it is not too late, have them provide pre-wiring for an in wall system, provided that you have the opportunity to specify the speaker location. Otherwise reasonably expect that they will be located where it is most conventional for the builder...

As far as simply a presence in the kitchen/dining area (in reference to your diagram), I would forget stereo pairs and instead use a single centrally mounted speaker in each utility zone for maximal intelligibility and a minimum of destructive vertically oriented polar lobing (just as a centrally mounted unit in say a church is superior to 2 spaced sources).


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## bambino (Feb 21, 2010)

You could use a pair of stereo in ceiling speakers that way your getting full sound in both sections of the house.:dontknow:


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## see4real (Sep 2, 2011)

Thanks! I appreciate the info. These would just be for stereo (or mono) listening, nothing to do with the 7.1 in the other room. This info will help - Thanks again.


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## mnhokie (Dec 2, 2008)

I would do something that looks good on the ceiling, so I'd tend to shy away from the diagonal one you show in your PDF. Do you have canned lights in the ceiling? If so, you may want to take these into account as well. To me, the speakers should blend seamleslly into the layout and not stand out.


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## see4real (Sep 2, 2011)

Thanks again everyone. In taking the feedback into consideration, I am wondering if one stereo speaker in the center of each room will do the trick? I'm just looking for background music, which may get kicked up to larger volumes, depending on the scenario. Each of these rooms is roughly 13x13 - do you think a single stereo 6.5" speaker would do the trick? Any suggestions are much appreciated!


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