Yes at minimum, get OFC copper. Do not fall for the silver plated copper bs though.

Copper is copper. Its function is to transport current and signal from point A to point B, it doesn't know or care if it's a car or a dedicated loudspeaker. Just keep to the rule of using the proper gauge for the length you want to run, it's that simple.

In my experience, people who swear by it do not like to discuss about the cables they bought. Ask them a question about it, all they say is "it depends on your system, it depends on your ears, it depends on your setup, it depends, it depends, it depends if the sun doesn't come up tomorrow".



If people want to buy cables because they look nice, go right ahead. It's like jewelry. A diamond is still after all, just carbon lol. But don't go around preaching those cables as if they do something different to the sound.

Debut 5.2? So 4 bookshelves + 1 center?

Ear level for the front speakers are only when you're doing critical listening. In movies when you're trying to ENJOY the movie, it doesn't matter. In fact, having the tweeter a couple inches higher is actually beneficial too as it increases the perceived soundstage height. 2" is fine, don't worry about it.

Surrounds should always be higher than ear level. But if you're doing Atmos/DTSX, it shouldn't be too high as the bed level speakers need to have some distance between it and the height level speakers.

No, for Atmos the surrounds can still be higher than the fronts. It just cannot be so high until there's not enough of a gap between it and the heights.

Most ceilings in our Malaysian homes are between 9-12ft (generally speaking). So if your on wall height speakers are mounted at the 11ft point, then there should at least be about 5ft of space between that and the bed level surround speakers.

Personally I have my surround channels about 1ft higher than ear level and there is still more than 5ft of space between them and the height channels, I find that the best sweet spot.

No. Why would you ever want tweeters that are angled upwards to the ceiling?

Upfring Atmos modules are stupid, period.

They can work in only a very specific condition:

- Your ceiling is FLAT and is REFLECTIVE (problem 1)
- Your ceiling must be no higher than 12ft, optimally it should be 8-10ft.
- You must sit in ONE location only, that means if you have guests, well too fucking bad for them.

@problem 1
You generally want your room to be controlled acoustically, that means having acoustic absorption. The L/R fronts and center speakers are a million times more important than the heights, so just because upfiring speakers requires the ceiling to be untreated and reflective, you'd then have to compromise on the most important speakers in the system? Do you see how stupid that sounds?

My opinion is that it doesn't serve a purpose at all. Why do Atmos when you're going to half ass it? Just don't do it instead. Spending the money, time and effort in getting the LCR channels right is a lot more important. If one cannot do Atmos and still wants surround, like you said - 5.1 is adequate, in fact more than adequate.

7.1 is indeed excessive for most living rooms in Malaysia. Considering that most homes are now also condos, 5.1 setups are also compromised because the typical positioning of a couch is usually flushed up against a wall.

Main take away is that people need to understand that spending RM5k on a pair of speakers just for the L and R gives them much better sound quality than squeezing RM5k into some half-assed Atmos setup. I've personally been through this and I can objectively show the differences in graphs and room measurements to prove it.

Hence that's why I think upfring Atmos modules are stupid. There are a lot of content now with Atmos tracks, but they still aren't done very well. Not a whole lot of movies has rivaled the dedicated Atmos demos that Dolby specifically made few years ago. I wasted a lot of time in getting Atmos right and to be frank, I don't think it was even worth all that effort at this point.


A dedicated room is indeed preferred, because you can control the variables. The right amount of absorption, the right amount of diffusion, the seating configuration, the sub placement (which is vitally important), all that requires a dedicated room. I built one myself just to have these kind of luxuries.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 15 2020, 03:33 PM

In-ceilings are the best solution for proper Atmos.

On-walls work as well, if you don't want to cut holes in your ceiling.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 15 2020, 04:25 PM

Wait, why would you have to be alone? You can have multiple seats in a dedicated room and optimize sound for all the seats.


Cutting holes in the ceiling, perhaps not for everyone.

But drilling holes in the wall to mount speakers? Come on... if you can drill holes to mount portraits, you can drill holes for speakers. Same concept.

@bolded
This is true. That's why those who are actually building their room from scratch will also build cabinets for the in-ceiling drivers. It's almost like a bookshelf except the driver will be using the ceiling as its baffle.


Yes, that's music in 2.0. But we're talking about HT for movies here. In my room, as far as multi-channel content is concerned, all my seats are sweet spots. There are no "mother in law" seats in my room.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 16 2020, 03:40 PM

Dolby's guidelines are not perfect. Their guidelines are based on a very specific room size and shape, which nobody at home has. So you can't just follow their placement guide and expect it to work.
What you can do however is use the formula of placement and toe-in angles in relation to your room.

An example is the front L/R calls for 60 degrees to the center point of your sit, but in Dolby's guide - they place the seat 1/4 length from the back of the room. But what if your seat isn't 1/4 length but instead 1/2 length (I hope not because this is usually where the biggest room null is for a rectangle shaped room)? Now you can't put the speakers at the same distance from the front wall and get 60 degrees anymore. So you compensate for that by changing the placement of the speakers. It's really all simple maths and geometry.

When I say multiple sweet spots, it means that each and every of my seats has an even bass response. I have 4 seats in my room and no single seat has more or less bass than the other. Because in a multi channel setup, it's common to use a dedicated center channel. So to avoid lobing issues, all you gotta do is either use a vertical center that is identical to the L/R channels or get a horizontal Woofer-Tweeter+Mid-Woofer configuration center, which is what I'm using (SVS Ultra center). Dialogue and pretty much anything that appears on screen is locked to the middle no matter where the seating position is then.

Yes there will be a compromise in surround panning that you have to live with if your side (I believe you're doing 5.1.4 right?) surrounds isn't wider than your fronts and isn't angled properly. You may notice a "hole" in the soundstage when objects off screen pans from the middle to the left then to your surround left. It would sound as if the object has disappeared momentarily then re-appear again to your side.

Delays can help to a certain extent, but I'm not sure if Audyssey would do that for you. Your adjustment would probably need to be manually tuned. This is because Audyssey calculates delays based on time from a channel to where the mic is placed, in relation to the reflections in the room. It does not compensate for your speaker placement for object based audio.

chriscym
Please don't use a tape measure. That's almost the dumbest way (besides eyeballing it) you can use to get speaker distance right. Only religious cable believers would do that. Distance is not actually distance in the AVR, it's actually called time delay a very long time ago.

The distance corresponds to how long it takes for sound to reach the MLP, in accordance to reflections, decay and ringing within the time domain of the room. An example, if the left surround speaker is 6ft away from your ears with a tape measure, you don't actually put 6ft in the distance setting on the AVR. You have to take in the reflections that will add to this time when it bounces to your floor, ceiling and side walls, it certainly will NOT be 6ft.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 18 2020, 09:29 PM

Audyssey does a decent job at it as long as you place the mic properly.

That means using a tripod or better yet, a tripod with a boom arm to hold the mic. Do not put the mic on pillows or boxes to level it until it reaches ear height as the mic will pick up the resonances from those surfaces (yes pillows DO NOT entirely kill sound, they still reflect them!).

Do not touch the impedance switch. LEAVE it at its default 8ohms. Pretend the impedance switch doesn't even exist.

Reason is because when you switch the impedance on the receiver to 4ohms (or 6 or whatever it allows you), what you're actually doing is actively cutting the power by up to 50%. Why would you ever want to do that? The impedance switch is there on the receiver so that it can pass a UL rating.

A speaker's nominal impedance is just simplified rating. NO speakers on earth has a static impedance number. The impedance of a speaker goes all over the place, very dynamically based on the load and frequencies it is playing. Impedance is NOT a linear scale. 6ohms nominal generally means that is how low the speaker will go over the majority of frequencies it is capable of playing.
But if you constrict the power supply in the first place, it doesn't even matter if your speaker can hit 30hz flat on paper, it won't because there's simply not enough power for it to reach that low and hence you run into distortion.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 23 2020, 03:55 PM

Ohm/impedance = resistance.

Guna logic sikit, why would you want to match impedance when that resistance is not even linear nor a fixed number in the first place?

It's not rocket science.

Volume on the receiver (or any amplifier) is not a linear scale. -23db in your room is different to -23db in my room for example. So you can't just directly ask people what volume they are at, because it's space dependent.

So if you want to know the average SPL, you need to get a SPL meter and measure at your listening spot how loud the summation of all the speakers are when you set the volume at certain value on the receiver. Theoretically all room calibration will try and match it where 0db = 85db average and 105db peaks. But auto room calibration isn't perfect and there can be errors in this, especially with the LFE and surround channels.

They don't ship to Msia lol. Already e-mailed them before. That Asia distro centre is only for SG.


Ported are nice for movies because below 30hz (which is where a lot of action movies have their bass mixed), the ported sub is 2-3 times louder than a sealed sub. With SVS ported subs, it doesn't mean they suck for music either.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Dec 20 2020, 10:26 PM