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M1 ACTIVE REFERENCE MANUAL 29
Placement of rear surrounds
The following suggestions for optimal M1 Active placement are derived from several
sources: 1) Standard industry practice for home installations as recommended by the
manufacturers of surround encoder/decoder units; 2) recommendations developed
by Tom Holman for setting up THX surround theater sound systems, and 3) Alesis
engineers’ experience fine-tuning the performance of the SMS Monitoring System in
order to find the mounting configuration which results in the most natural and
accurate surround placement. With the many different playback systems in use,
there is room for interpretation of what the best placement is in a control room, but
the following represents a good starting point which you are free to change to your
taste.
Vertically, the M1 Actives should be placed on the side wall of the control room,
above your head, with the woofers on top, tweeters on the bottom. The ideal location
is to have the center of the speaker (between the woofer and tweeter) at 80% of the
floor-to-ceiling height. (For a standard 8 foot ceiling height the center line would be
at 96” x 80% = 76.8” from the floor.)
Recommended positioning of surround speakers
20%
80%
3’ min
Point Surround tweeters
mounted down
Horizontally, place the M1 Actives slightly behind the 90° position, at 110° on each
side. Make sure that at the position used, there is still at least 3 feet to the back wall
of your studio. If you do not have at least 3 feet to the back of your studio, then the
speakers will work better if placed diagonally in the rear corner as shown on the next
page.