I may have a situation in my livingroom where I have to place the front speakers in a 5.1 system unequal distances from the tv (one right next to it, one about 3-4' away). I have a Pioneer VSX1014 receiver, which does automatic balancing etc. My question is whether this balancing can compensate for this kind of asymmetry where tv is much closer to one side than the other. Would either level or delay make up for this?
Michael, it doesnt really matter. Ideally, you want them centered on your primary seating positions, and not necessarily your TV. Normally, your primary positions will be close to centered on the TV, but not always.
My fronts arent exactly centered on the TV and sit about 15ft apart. The TV sits about 2 feet off center between the two. Front speakers arent usually shielded, and you dont want them sitting direcly next to your TV anyway.
IE.....If your primary seating positions are 10feet wide, ideally you'll want your speakers 10 feet apart. The goal is to fill your room with sound, and 'NOT' that the sound is necessarily coming directly from the TV.
It sort of makes sense, although intuitively I imagine that you are creating the perception of sounds being placed in space - so that if a voice sounds like it is coming from the middle, but your tv is actually off to the side, doesn't that get weird? Won't you feel like someone is talking from off screen, even though they are centered on screen?
What if one speaker were a foot to left of tv, and the other were 10 feet to right? (THis would actually work better for us in terms of music listening). I would think this is way too extreme?
Toe in the speakers so that the tweeters are basically in line with your main seating position, that's all you need to do.
If you have decent speakers they should be able to disperse the sound enough so that you can't locate exactly where most of the sound comes from.
Also, if these are smaller speakers I'd recommend putting them on some stands, the higher the better---in my experience this opens up the sound and saturates the room much better.
You didn't mention whether you have a center speaker sitting on top of the TV. If you do, THEN you would notice more of an off-balance quality in the sound...but the Pioneer should have a feature to allow you to compensate for that.
I do have (or soon will have) a center spkr - CSW MC300. And the receiver does compensate as far as I can tell from the manual. Going to use either CSW M60s or MC300s for fronts - any sense of which might be less position sensitive?
With distance to listening position about 15' from tv, would I be better off with the tv centered with speakers right next to it - only about 4' apart vs having the speakers more like 13' apart, but tv not centered?
Basic rule of thumb is that the distance between the speakers should not be greater than the distance from the speakers to your listening position, optimal separation is about 2/3 of the distance to your listening position.
As for your center speaker choice, I'd go with whichever has the higher sensitivity rating and larger driver. The center should be the same make (and model if possible) as your L/R speakers for timbre matching---much more important than the rears being the same brand/model. Since the center does 80% of the work during movies and TV, this is one area I wouldn't scrimp on.