The 5.1 set was quickly connected, but what to do with the 4 additional power amplifiers? Thanks to excellent app control, the models are finally also excellently suited as multi-room amplifiers.
With a smartphone or iPad, everything from volume to music selection can be excellently controlled from adjacent rooms. But many customers don't even want a multi-room solution or prefer the even more comfortable Sonos system?
So we tested Plan B and, in the first step, put the surround-back speakers into operation. As expected, the advantage here largely depends on the positioning of the speakers. If the listening area is not very large and the surround speakers are optimally placed, the gain is audible, but not as great as hoped. Especially if the soundtrack uses surround effects very sparingly, not much happens from behind - whether 5.1 or 7.1. With music Blu-rays, the difference is even smaller, as usually only some reverberation and audience noises are mixed in the surround area.
So, after a long time, we dedicated ourselves to an increasingly relevant topic: Front Height, i.e., the use of 2 additional speakers above the front speakers.
Since we work with video projectors in all our cinemas, we have a problem: The center cannot be mounted at the same height as the front speakers, as it would then be in the middle of the picture. Instead, the center speaker is positioned at about knee height directly below the screen. Problem: Due to the large screen, the actors' faces are at a height of approx. 1.50m - but the center is only mounted at a height of 55cm. The voice does not optimally match the picture in terms of assignment.
The professional solution (as used in multiplex cinemas and in our largest home cinema) is a sound-transparent screen with speakers mounted behind it. However, since this requires very high screen costs and extensive structural measures, this implementation is too complex and expensive for many home cinema users.
This is where the height speakers come in: Yamaha has been offering the option of using "height speakers" for over 10 years, which are supposed to separate the voice from the center and acoustically raise it. Since we hadn't addressed the topic for some years, we felt it was time to push this technology again. Because for the first time, a battery of 9 speakers can be powered with affordable receivers (e.g., the RX-A 2010 for 1400€ RRP).
Since very few customers can use large speakers above their TV or screen at home, we opted entirely for a high-quality and compact setup with Monitor Audio speakers from the Radius series. 3x Radius 225HD work in the front, and 2x Radius 90HD are used as height speakers. At a price of 400€ including swivel and tilt wall mount, these small but high-quality speakers are probably currently the simplest and most convincing solution for this application in terms of price/performance.
After wiring, the set is re-calibrated and the height speakers are automatically and correctly recognized - the first movie playback initially showed no change. But the Dialog-Lift function in the "Option menu" then shows the advantages all the more clearly:
The voices are not "only" raised, but also broadened - acoustically, they actually seem to come from the entire screen. For the optimal effect, we had to switch the Dialog-Lift to level "4" (max. is "5"). Surprisingly, speech intelligibility was even drastically increased - contrary to my expectations. While in the surround area, an artificial addition of further channels often leads to a loss of clear assignability, nothing of this was noticeable with the center lift.
In fact, the performance impressed me so much that I reproduced the experiment in my home cinema:
7.1 (with surround-back, i.e. quasi 3.4.1) converted to 7.1 with Front Height (i.e. quasi 5.2.1).
The result is absolutely stunning - because much more happens in the front area during mixing than in the effect area - and likewise, the advantages of the additional front speakers are more clearly evident than additional surround speakers. Now it's actually time to replace the existing Yamaha RX-A 2067 (7 power amplifiers) with a new model and take both advantages with it...
We currently have a 7.1 set from the Monitor Audio Radius series on a Yamaha RX-A3010 ready for demonstration and would be happy to show you the differences - it's worth it! Next, we will dedicate ourselves to Audyssey DSX and Pro Logic 2z, both circuits allow the addition of these height speakers. The exciting question here is whether they master the center lift just as precisely and effectively.
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