Originally Posted by 30Sixteen:
“I have a Marantz NR-1506 5.1 receiver which I haven't installed yet. I have the 6 speakers (Inc Subwoofer) to connect to it but unfortunately I don't really have room for the 2 from speakers anywhere due to the setup up of my relatively small living room.
I was wondering if there was anyway I could get a decent sound from it by using just the REAR L+R, CENTRE and SUBWOOFER?”
Originally Posted by 30Sixteen:
“Unfortunately a sound bar isn't an option as a member of my family is slightly hard of hearing and we need the rear speakers (the reason for buy the receiver) and it's not the size of the front speakers that is the problem. it's literally that I have nowhere to put any speakers other then underneath the TV where the centre speaker will be.
I was hoping there might have been a way to connect all the from to the centre or something.”
There's more to this than a first glance reading suggests.
Matt, what's your primary objective here? Is it good sound for everyone or do you want better sound for just one person who is hard of hearing?
The reason why rears + centre + sub won't really work is to do with the way AV receivers split up the sound. For sound from TV which is usually either stereo or encoded with Dolby Surround then the receiver separates the sound (or tries to) in to a voice channel (the centre speaker), music + effects + some L/R panning of voices (the front L & R speakers), and the scraps of sound to give the impression of ambience (the rear channels). Bass is handled by the sub if the centre and four surround speakers need some extra oomph. So, if you have just the centre and the surrounds then you'll get only the dialogue from the centre and then some ambient surround effects from the rears which is going to sound really odd without the front L&R channels playing. However, this isn't the end of the story.
For a start there's nothing to say that you have to let the AV receiver decide for itself what it does with sound. There are modes such as All-Channel-Stereo which, as the name suggests, takes a signal and puts it out as stereo across all the speakers. This would give you the same stereo signal across the rear speakers as there is across the fronts. "So what's the catch?" you might ask.
The answer to that question is in the speaker set-up of the receiver. There are certain combinations of speakers that receivers will support. For example: Centre + Front L&R, that's valid. Front L&R only. Front L&R + sub. They're valid too. What there isn't is a combination of Centre
without Front L&R but
with Rear L&R. For the reason alluded to earlier, that's just not a valid combination. What you're looking at then is some combination where you do have either the Front L&R or the Centre + Front L&R and then the rears in either combination. .
"
What happens when there's no Centre speaker? "
If there's only limited speaker room at the front then this could be a useful layout. When there's no Centre speaker set up then the receiver combines the Front L&R plus the Centre channel sound feeds and pumps them in to just the front stereo pair. (This is exactly what happens in a conventional stereo system anyway.) The centre channel sound comes from a mid position half way between the two front stereo speakers. This is called a
Phantom Centre. Voices sound like they're coming from an invisible centre speaker; hence "
phantom". This phantom arrangement is never quite as good for movies and TV as having a real centre speaker, but it's still pretty effective.
"
What about this idea of the Front L&R + Centre under the TV?"
As long as they're an appropriate size then there's nothing to stop you taking the Front L&R speakers, turning them through 90 degrees so they sit landscape-fashion and creating your own pseudo-sound bar: the Centre flanked by the Front L&R all laid out under the TV. Clearly you can't do this with floorstanding L&R speakers, or with larger stand-mount speakers; but you certainly can with the sort of smaller bookshelf speakers that are popular in better quality 5.1 speaker packages. Those who say you won't get the full benefit of the front channel effects and panning are largely correct. But if it's a toss-up between the loss of a little bit of panning effect versus ditching the whole 5.1 system then I know which I would settle for.