Surround Sound Speaker Systems

Emotiva ERT-8.3 Tower Speakers, ERM-6.3 Monitor, and ERD-1 Surround Speakers

Setup

I set up the speakers where the main speakers and my head occupied the vertices of and equilateral triangle that was roughly 12’ on a side. The main speakers were toed-in to aim directly at my listening position. The nested array of mids/tweeters on the ERT-8.3’s are designed so that the tweeter would normally be near the outer edge of the cabinet. I wound up switching the left and right speakers so the tweeter was on the inside. This filled-in the soundstage and provided better imaging since the diffraction effects were now minimized for my particular set-up.

All the Emotiva speakers have a series of toggle switches near the inputs. I left everything on “flat”, boundary compensation off (except for the center speaker which sat in a cabinet below my screen) and extension set to high. For the surrounds, I ran them in bipolar mode the whole time. The toggles on the ERD-1 surround speakers allow the user to operate the speakers as bipoles or dipoles as well as providing the ability to tweak the phasing. Very nice.