How To Set Up A Kenwood Surround Sound System

How To Gear up Upwardly Your Surround Audio System

Setting Upwardly a five:1 Room

When it comes to setting up a listening room, there are many things that agree true betwixt both film product and audio product studios. For case, both rooms are designed to enable engineers and producers to make contained discernations on program cloth by facilitating an acoustically transparent listening space - a space where they can trust their artistic decisions. Setting up your room to brand the nearly of its acoustic properties significantly depends on how you identify your listening position and speakers in both film and audio production environments.

Yet the fact that a 5:1 playback arrangement has a greater amount of channels means that in that location is a bit more than work involved in calibrating your ready to optimise its acoustics. This document will base its guidelines on the International Telecommunications Union ITU-R BS. 775 standard, which is the nearly commonly referenced standard for multichannel sound reproduction.

Your room'due south acoustic will depend on these three very of import criteria:

• The geometry of the room which determines its acoustic properties,
• The positioning and operation of the playback arrangement,
• Localisation of the sweet spot or listening position.

Room size

For the majority of film studios in urban metropolitan areas, information technology can exist quite challenging to overcome the acoustic bug that are inherent in rooms with smaller proportions. For a 5:ane mixing suite, we would strongly suggest that the surface area of your room should exist greater than 20 square meters (AES and ITU standards suggest under 30 - 70).

This is because of the physical characteristics of how sound propagates in small spaces. This may include a thin distribution of low frequency modal content, or comb filtering due to either first reflections or speaker boundary interference. For this reason, it is extremely important to set upward your listening position correct the beginning time, and luckily - there are a agglomeration of gratuitous tools and resources to help yous do so!

Pace 1 - Model your room in a complimentary online acoustics estimator

It'due south very easy and it'southward gratis. If your room is box shaped, yous tin use a gratuitous online calculator to predict which frequencies may exist problematic, and where their force per unit area zones may lie. Some acoustic calculators even provide a sine wave function generator which lets you lot play different frequencies, assuasive you to test the model in existent time. The following screenshot is a capture from an acoustics calculator chosen amroc by amcoustics.com:

We can run across that there is a strong centric mode which has a pressure level build up at the center of the room, causing a disturbance at roughly 61Hz or B1. The effect is that every time you hear the annotation B1, it may sound uneven to the other notes or frequencies inside the room.Information technology may have a longer decay and poorer transient response - sounding dirty and undefined.

From this information, you can start to gain an agreement of the acoustic landscape within your listening space and make notes about which frequencies y'all may want to target through your room setup.  (Unfortunately irregular shaped rooms will have to rely on measurement data to define what the audio-visual state of affairs may be like).

Step 2 - Refer to your monitoring guide!

Before proceeding with your speaker prepare upwards and placement, please read your documents! Your monitor'south operating transmission should draw how your reference monitor loudspeakers should exist gear up, whether that be vertically or horizontally. (Annotation: not all monitors are suitable for horizontal placement). Information technology is advised not to play with the room equalisation settings or trimming filters on the back of your speaker until you accept wearied all other options afterwards treatment.

For a 5:1 system, you should make sure that every aqueduct is the aforementioned monitor brand and type. This is meant to create coherence betwixt your channels, allowing for smoother mixing and editing.

Step 3 - Loudspeaker placement

So, once you have inspected the details concerning the right prepare of your monitoring system, we can start thinking about where to place them! For a 5:1 system y'all can refer to the following tabular array:

*Depends on optimal placement either via cancellation or driving manner from a null betoken. LFE channels may likewise exist affluent mounted in optimal cases.

Referencing your placement

The reference listening position is divers as the acoustic centre. Your listening position inside the room may vary with the base altitude of speakers, just pay attention to ensure that it does not put you at 50% of the room's length axis!  That is ane of the worst positions to be situated. Finding an optimal position may take a lilliputian bit of experimentation. On the near basic level, you tin can utilise your ears as your measurement apparatus!

Should I put my sugariness spot on the width or length axis?

For the majority of cases, your setup will localise the reference listening position along the longest centrality of your room. However it is as well possible to set your speakers along the widest centrality (depending on what is practical and sounds best).

Try moving yourself backward and forward through the center of the width (or length) centrality of your room, while playing either pinkish dissonance or a sine part of your problematic frequencies. Using Wes Laschot'due south 38% guideline as a starting point, effort to marker on the flooring where yous feel that there is an fifty-fifty distribution of tones, and where you retrieve some may exist exaggerated whilst moving dorsum or forth. Ideally you should try to use your listening position as your reference to placing the residuum of your monitors.

Base Distance

The base altitude between all of your channels should be a minimum of 1.7m to a maximum of 4m. The base distance is the distance of the speaker to your sugariness spot position.

Speaker Height

The speaker height should lucifer your ear level height, from the point between the tweeter and woofer of your monitor. Please note that when you tilt your speakers you should be doing then by no more than xv degrees, and be warned that moving slightly frontward or backward will modify the frequency response of your listening position.

Surrounding walls

The distance from the speaker to its nearest reflecting surfaces will make up one's mind the speaker purlieus interference and the comb filtered frequencies of the first reflection points. For a five:i organization, coherence between the channels tin be accomplished by having a compatible distance from each speaker to the wall.  That ways that the distance of your L/R channels to the nearest walls should exist the same (or as similar as possible) every bit the environment channels to their nearest walls.

LFE

Low frequency content is important to movie theatre, it's also why subwoofer placement in a 5:i arrangement is likewise important to consider. If flush mounting is not an option, you can try to play around with two different methods that target fundamental modes used for subwoofer placement:

• Driving from a null point to attenuate a mode by manner of the ¼ wavelength rule.
• Phase cancellation by opposite stage and equal amplitude.

Ideally, you lot would be using a measurement software to analyse your results in terms of frequency and stage content. Withal if this is not possible, you can apply your ears to notice the almost linear position. Try to avert placing your sub in the middle, as this tends to excite your strongest centric modes. It'south also important to consider your crossover frequency in these tests!

 Step 4 - Getting Precise

Try using a measurement software such as Room EQ Wizard to map the frequency response of each aqueduct using an MLS sequence or logarithmic sweep. In high level mixing suites, there should be less than +- 3dB variation per channel with less than 20 microseconds of delay. Endeavour to find a spot every bit close every bit y'all can to this goal!

Play effectually with your positioning and the dimensions of your monitors to find the verbal position where your Left, Right and Surround channels are closest to each other in terms of stage, frequency and symmetry. The following screenshots are taken from 2 different measurements taken in a 14m² room (quite small - yet standard for well-nigh urban spaces):

Pay attention to the dip at 150Hz. Both Speakers were positioned 52cm to the front wall, and 80cm from the side wall, with a base distance of roughly i.45m.

Better:

Notice how the dip at 150Hz completely disappears and the two lines mirror each other in more detail, and that's without any handling!!!! Both speakers were moved to a altitude of 37cm from the front end wall and 51cm from the side walls, with a base distance of roughly 1.9m. For a 5:1 system, you lot would ideally exist aiming to accept all v channels mirror each other as closely as possible in terms of their frequency and amplitude response.

Pace 5 - Furnishings

The terminal step should be to bring in your furniture and studio equipment such as mixing consoles, monitors and other gear. If you desire to get nitpicky, you could brand some other measurement to see if your desk or other equipment could be leading to comb filtering through reflections.

Pace 6 - Treatment

Once you are confident with your monitoring and listening position, you will exist in a good position to proceed with the installation of your treatment. A 5:ane system is going to need a lot more treatment and coverage over a larger surface expanse than a stereo system, equally the effective size of the showtime reflecting points and areas are much larger than in a stereo organization.

If you get it correct the first fourth dimension, you tin can rest assured that you lot take exhausted all possibilities and know that your electric current listening position is the all-time spot in the room.

Source: https://www.kissyourears.com/pages/how-to-set-up-your-surround-sound-system

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