Getting a loudspeaker system is just the beginning. Once you get everything home, you still need to set up your speakers for the best possible listening experience. It’s this accurate home theater speaker placement that separates the truly dedicated from the amateurs. Others have written extensive articles detailing every possible way to configure a room full of speakers. Rather than go down that path, I will simplify things a bit to make it more palatable for the masses. After all, I’m not trying to give you a degree in sound reinforcement, just give you a leg up in home theater speaker placement for your living space that approximates the surround sound you experience in the theater.

As mentioned above, the most common configurations are 5.1.2 or 5.1.4, which add two and four height speakers to a traditional 5.1 surround setup respectively, though Dolby supports much larger. THX, Dolby Digital and DTS Digital Certified sound Immerse yourself in a theater-quality audio experience in the comfort of your home from this 5.1 speaker system. 1000 Watts peak/500 Watts RMS power delivers powerful surround sound that is THX Certified to bring you a premium audio experience as well as designed to decode Dolby Digital and DTS. If you have a 7.1 surround setup or even more speakers than that, please switch your speaker configuration to 5.1 before you play these files. The files are made for 5.1 audio and if your speaker configuration is set to 7.1 or anything else, they will not sound like they are meant to.

And that’s what we’re really going for here—to get as close to that theatrical experience as possible. But there are huge differences in loudspeaker placement when you compare home theater speaker placement against a movie theater. For one, home theaters tend to be more reflective in their acoustical properties. A movie theater is designed to be almost completely “dead”. Nearly all of the sound you hear in a theater is coming from the speakers. In the home, the room plays an important role.

You also have a lot more speakers in a movie theater, often with several surround speakers along both the side and back of the room. And the front and center speakers are located behind a perforated screen, so that the sound emanates completely from the on-screen action. While this is possible in home theater which uses a front projection system, it’s often not practical to place speakers behind a screen. The good news for you is that most people can move speakers around a room without much trouble or even having to break out the cordless power tools. Plus, if you’re still in the setup stage, you can try out several locations to find one that’s right for you before you do a final install.

Getting Started—How Many Speakers Are You Using?

Whether you’re planning your home theater, or you have already purchased speakers, a big question is: How many speakers are you placing in the room? This is a basic starting point, but it will allow you to jump down to the appropriate part of this article to fit your particular application. You may want to read through the whole thing, however, as we do explain ways to configure your system so that it’s ready for a potential future upgrade. You may also want to see our article on Upgrading Your Speakers Hassle-free for tips on when and how to go from one configuration to another.

Stereo Two-channel Speaker Placement

The most basic audio system is a stereo system. But that doesn’t mean you can just throw speakers into a room and expect great sound. For one, there is an audio characteristic called “imaging” that deals with how the stereo separation is perceived by the listener. This also affects the “soundstage” which is how you can locate individual sounds within the stereo image. A good soundstage will let you, for example, point out where the cellist is sitting when listening to a live recording of quartet.

You affect both soundstage and imaging by a combination of the distance between the speakers, the distance from the speakers to the listener, and the angle at which the speakers are “toed-in” or pointed at the center listening position. We can help with the initial layout, however we recommend you experiment with loudspeaker toe-in to get the best sound. Some speakers do better pointed nearly straight ahead, perpendicular to the rear wall, while others want to be pointed nearly directly at the center “hot” seat. Backing up, here are some recommendations for setting up stereo speakers in a room:

Speaker placement for 2-channel listening

Start by setting up your front speakers so that you form a triangle with the primary (center) listening position. Make sure you give your speakers enough room between them that they can create a nice stereo image. Lots of times we see people place their speakers directly to the right and left of their television. While this may meet the aesthetic requirements of your spouse, a 42-inch or 50-inch television is not going to provide enough stereo separation for your music to sound good, nor will it allow for movies to have that expansive theatrical sound.

Once you get the distance and positioning correct, experiment with the toe-in of the speakers. Start with the speakers only slightly toed-in (angled towards the center seated position) and play back a piece of music you are familiar with—preferably a live track so you can attempt to ascertain the location of various performers on stage. After listening for a bit, get up and slightly increase the angle of the speakers, always moving them further inward. Listen again. The point at which you can hear the widest, most expansive sound and most accurately “pinpoint” musicians where they are playing on the stage is the correct amount of toe-in for your speakers.

5.1 Surround Home Theater Speaker Placement for Movies

The nice thing about adding more speakers is that you build upon what you’ve already done. For example, expanding a stereo system into 5.1 surround doesn’t require you to re-position the front speakers—unless you upgrade. With 5.1 there are two basic home theater speaker placement configurations: the recommended configuration and the “drop back and punt” configuration. It’s not that the second configuration is awful, but it’s not what will best reproduce 5.1 surround as it was mixed. In either case, here is the standard method of configuring a room for 5.1 surround:

In a typical 5.1 surround placement you will want to place your surround speakers to the side and just behind the listening position. Often, these speakers are diffuse speakers, called “dipole” speakers. The reason for this is that, for movies, surround speakers are meant to be ambient-supplying sources for effects and backgrounds, with the occasional point-source effect.

If you can’t place your speakers to the side, then an alternate rear-wall placement is a great secondary option. With this home theater speaker placement, be sure not to point the rear speakers towards the listening position—at least not if your goal is to configure the system for primarily movie-watching. Here is what that style of speaker layout might look like:

Speaker placement for 5.1 (alternate)

5.1 Surround Speaker Placement for Music

For multi-channel music you keep almost the same configuration as the 5.1 surround layout above, however you want speakers that are not diffuse. These can be two-way bookshelf speakers, or even another matched pair of tower speakers. These surrounds will be separated by at least 60 degrees or more and angled inward towards the center listening seat.

With this type of loudspeaker arrangement, you will get a rich and full surround experience when listening to SACDs, DVD-Audio discs, or any Blu-ray concert DVD that has multi-channel audio. Above all, you want to try and place the seating area equidistant from all of the speakers. That’s not to say that you can’t do this if you simply must have your rear speakers closer to you than your fronts, but ideally, this is the arrangement. If you do need to position your speakers differently, use your AV receiver’s distance and level settings to calibrate your system so that all playback levels are the same.

7.1 Surround Speaker Placement

7.1 is great if you have some room behind your listening position. Many living spaces can accommodate this, but it takes a room that’s long enough for the extra speakers to be worth it. We would assert that if your room doesn’t easily support a 7.1 system, you’re better off upgrading your 5.1 speakers over adding a couple more and trying to make it work. With 7.1 there are actually two schools of thought for placement of home theater speakers. If you have a THX-certified AV receiver, you can use the ASA (Advanced Speaker Array) DSP to enable some very impressive surround sound. The way it works is to place two speakers nearly side-by-side at the rear of the room, with the rest of the room configured as you would with a regular 5.1 surround sound system. These rear speakers will then interact with the side surrounds to deliver accurate or diffuse surrounds based on the mode and the content being played back. THX has designed this to be flexible enough to handle all of the required surround formats and they recommend it when used in conjunction with equipment that has their particular digital signal processing (THX-certified AV receivers).

Recommended speaker placement for 7.1 THX

If you don’t have a THX receiver, then you may want to set up your room for standard Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio playback. This is a similar layout, except that the rear speakers are placed roughly 60 degrees apart on the rear wall.

Recommended speaker placement for 7.1 Dolby Digital

Exceptions to the Rule and Alternate Placement Options

Not everyone has the same size or shape room. And, of course, not everyone has the same speakers. With surround sound you get a lot of flexibility, but you do want to adhere to as many of the “rules” as possible. Here are a few to try and stick to whenever possible:

• Try to keep your speakers parallel with each other. Your surrounds should both be the same distance back from the front of the room as opposed to having one be closer to the television than another.
• Avoid in-ceiling main or center-channel speakers when possible. You want the sound to come from the screen/television and elevated speakers tend to take the action away from the screen.
• Placing a subwoofer in a corner, though popular, results in more “peaky” uneven bass response. Try and put your sub at least a few feet away from a corner whenever possible. This is a general suggestion and so we recommend using our Where Do I Place My Subwoofer guide to find the best spot for your subwoofer.
• Di-pole surround speakers create a nice diffuse sound for soundtracks while bi-pole speakers offer more direct sound. Some surround speakers can switch in-between both modes. While this isn’t terribly convenient, it may offer you some more flexibility if you’re on the fence as to whether you listen more to movies or music in multi-channel surround sound.
• Try not to sit against a rear wall. If you can even move your seat or sofa a foot or two away from the rear wall it will help eliminate acoustical problems associated with being up against a boundary wall.
• Always level match your speakers after you adjust them in any way—whether you move them, or toe them in or change out any equipment.

Conclusion

Speaker placement could be an exact science, were it not for the fact that hardly anyone has the perfect room! Do you best and, above all, experiment! Half the fun of setting up and configuring a surround sound speaker system is getting to tweak it until you get the best possible sound—and that means watching lots of movies and listening to lots of music. It’s like going fishing—if you have the right attitude you know the process is going to be fun no matter what the result. So tweak, and tweak, and tweak some more. When you get it right, you’ll know.

Do you have a 5.1 listening room or a 7.1 listening room? We want to know. Leave us a comment below or on Facebook and join in the discussion.

Dolby Atmos just got its biggest promotion yet - it's now supported by Apple TV 4K, making Apple's video streamer the first to support both Vision and Atmos.

And while there's a lot of excitement around the Dolby Atmos format, it's one that's still a bit tricky to wrap your head (and ears!) around.

In brief, Dolby Atmos a new audio format that allows you to hear sound in a 360-degree bubble. With its object-oriented audio engineering and its up-or-down-firing speakers, Atmos is changing the way home theaters are setup and, more importantly, how sound is distributed in the room.

In the past, we've explored how exactly Dolby Atmos is the future of cinema sound, as well as how the technology is hacking our ears. But we've never sat down to truly explain what the technology is, why it's important and, most importantly, how you can get it in your own home. Until now.

[Update: Apple TV 4K now supports Dolby Atmos, and have pledged to upgrade your film collection for free if there's a matching version with Atmos support available.]

The basics: what is Dolby Atmos?

Dolby Atmos is a new audio format – like stereo sound or surround sound that takes recorded audio from a movie soundtrack or a video game and spits it out in a more immersive way. Dolby Atmos gives sound a more three-dimensional effect – imagine the difference between hearing a helicopter flying a few hundred yards away versus directly over your head.

The technology is being developed by Dolby Laboratories, an audio company that specializes in sound reproduction and encoding. You've probably seen their logo on DVD or Blu-ray boxes or on the latest audio equipment.

The audio mixing happens in sound studios where audio engineers take sound effects in movies and digitally move them around three-dimensional space. When you play the movie back using Dolby Atmos-enabled audio devices, you'll be able to hear the effects move around you, just like the audio engineers intended.

Of course, to hear Dolby Atmos, you'll need a Dolby Atmos-compatible film or TV show file (found on Netflix and now iTunes), as well as a Dolby Atmos-enabled player and a Dolby Atmos-enabled speaker system or soundbar.

So how does Dolby plan on creating a sound bubble? For the answer to that question, all you have to do is look up.

Dolby Atmos creates a bubble of sound by bouncing beams of audio off your ceiling and then to your ears. As you might imagine, this takes a bit of calibration, and a fairly flat ceiling. As long as you have the latter and don't mind doing the former when it comes time, let's press on.

Step 1. Finding the system

So how do you get Dolby Atmos? The first part is getting the right hardware - audio equipment that supports Dolby Atmos as well as a Dolby Atmos-compatible player.

Of course, if that sounds too challenging, you can always just buy a system that integrates both: The Dolby Atmos-ready LG W7 OLED is fantastic with a built-in 5.0.2 soundbar that's just all-too-happy to bring you room-filling audio for a mere $6,999 (£6,999 or AU$13,499).

If you don't have $7,000 burning a hole in your pocket, however, there are plenty of cheaper entry points – an Xbox One S or an Oppo UDP-203 4K Blu-ray player hooked up to an LG SJ9 Soundbar would do the trick.

If you'd rather just expand the home system you already have, major audio manufacturers like Onkyo, Denon, Yamaha and Pioneer all make audio/visual receivers capable of processing Dolby Atmos audio tracks, with few distinctions for the layman between the mid-tier models.

The key point here is that as long as you have Dolby Atmos content fed through a Dolby Atmos player to a pair of Dolby Atmos speakers, you're all set.

If you're still a bit hazy about where to start shopping for Atmos products, Dolby offers a handy catalog of all the current Dolby Atmos-ready products.

Step 2. Finding content and testing it out

Let's turn on the system and connect it to a Dolby Atmos-capable player (Xbox One or a Dolby Atmos-enabled Blu-ray player). Good job! Now, all that's left to find is some Dolby Atmos content.

Thankfully, that's a task that becomes easier with each and every passing day. The best way to test out the new system is with Netflix's DeathNote, BLAME! or Okja (available with both Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, a version of HDR that enhances the colors and contrast of your favorite films).

How do you know it's playing in Dolby Atmos? Look for the Atmos icon next to the title of the film.

If you're looking for more content to watch, check out one of the 100+ titles available on 4K Blu-ray that have Dolby Atmos. (For a full list, click here.)

For gamers, however, native Dolby Atmos content is still a bit sparse. Right now, only two games are mixed for Dolby Atmos: Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront – both of which require the PC versions of the game.

There is another way to get Dolby Atmos in games, though.

Dolby has recently launched the Dolby Access app on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs that upmixes stereo and 5.1 surround mixes to Dolby Atmos. The app is free to try and available to own for $14.99. Upmixed content never quite sounds as good as native Atmos, but hey, $15 is a whole lot cheaper than a brand-new soundbar or receiver, that's for sure.

So, what are you looking for once you've got your content? Dolby Atmos creates a sound bubble of audio. You should be able to hear raindrops falling from the sky and thunder in clouds that sound like they're 10 feet above your head. Ideally, it should feel like your room is filled with sound from every direction. If it doesn't, re-check the connections or dive back into the settings.

Dolby Atmos works best in a smaller room with a level ceiling. Changing the slope of the ceiling messes with the reflection angle of the surround sound.

Atmos is a lot like 4K, in a way

Dolby outlines three other primary sources for Atmos content: there are games on PC like Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefield 1, Dolby Atmos-compatible Blu-rays and movies from streaming services like Netflix and Vudu, the Walmart-owned video streaming service.

Now, problematically, you might didn't have all of these on hand. The landscape is still a bit scattered at the moment. It's something Dolby has done its best to correct, but because it depends on partnerships to bring content to the masses (see: Microsoft, LG, Netflix, Vudu, Oppo, etc...) finding all the content in one spot is, at this point, a technical impossibility.

The good news is that the technology is still in its infancy. In conversations with top Dolby engineers, they've admitted that there are still some kinks to the distribution process that they hope will be alleviated when the platform grows larger and more robust. In our opinion, it's still really clever and interesting technology that will revolutionize the home cinema once it becomes the standard, rather than something reserved for audiophiles like myself.

Like Ultra-HD, there's not a lot of content out there to support the tech, but do a bit of digging and you'll uncover some real ear-candy.

Should you upgrade to Dolby Atmos?

The big question: Should you upgrade your system to Dolby Atmos?

If you're an entertainment junky keen on having the latest and greatest tech – i.e. you already own a 4K TV and a seriously sweet surround sound system – then yes. But if you're an average movie or TV buff, I would wait until the tech begins to normalize and comes down a bit more in price.

The technology is almost ready for mainstream consumption with a number of game developers working on titles that support Atmos and with Hollywood seemingly loving the technology which means now might be the best time to jump on the bandwagon.

Like 4K TVs a few years ago, Dolby Atmos isn't for everyone. It's not the easiest thing to wrap your head around and content isn't as much of a buffet as it is a fine three-course dinner. It's an investment in the future of audio technology, one that will pay off down the road but right now feels like a bit of a risk.

• Convinced? Check out the best Dolby Atmos speakers, or the best soundbars overall