I am planning a 5.1 in-ceiling setup around a fireplace and mantle with three HTR7000 fronts and two Invisa 650 rears. The room has a ten foot ceiling and I am planning to place the 7000’s one foot off the front wall and eight feet apart left to right. While sitting on the couch, my ears are about ten feet from the front wall and about five feet from the ceiling, so I think I am very close to the 7000’s thirty degree tweeter sweet spot angle from the front speakers. I was going to place the rear 650’s at the same eight feet left to right separation and about thirteen feet from the front wall to put them slightly behind the couch, but I have read some recent posts on your forum dissuading the use of 650’s as direct overhead rears. My budget encourages the use of the 650’s instead of 7000’s for rears, so please help me determine their best placement as rears or convince me to exchange them for two more 7000’s.

Also, this system will be powered by a Marantz SR7007 125 watt receiver, connected with 12 gauge copper stranded speaker wire and will use a ForceField 4 or 5 sub. I would welcome any advice or feedback regarding these components.

Hey Shopit,
It sounds like a plan to me.
I do not have experience with the in ceiling speakers, but GEt makes wonderful sounding products, so these must be good.
I would recommend tower speakers if you can manage them, but whatever floats your boat.
I have the ForceField 5 and can recommend it.
Happy listening.
God Bless,
Wayne

Should be a great setup, at a glance it sounds like the geometry is pretty good - maybe a tad more distance between L/R would be nice. As far as in-ceiling surround speakers (for a 5,1 system), that's simple a preference thing. A lot of people just don't like the surround effects raining down from above (great for Atmos with your ten foot ceiling though). It is certainly a fine setup and we see that done all the time with good results. Using HTR 7000's instead, if placement and budget permit, can eliminate the surrounds sounding above you rather than around you, as intended.

Thank you for the feedback. Can you be more specific about your suggested L/R separation in feet and why? I was assuming that the ability to spin the 7000's in the ceiling was equivalent to toe-in from towers, so the eight foot separation was enough to experiment aiming the tweeters anywhere between perpendicular to the front wall to converging on the center of the couch .

Regarding the rears, I am at a loss to understand why the 650's closer to overhead would sound more localized than the 7000's? To respect the 30 degree tweeter angle on the 7000's in a ten foot ceiling, those speakers would need to be about 9 feet from the listener's ears, so that produces a very large arc from the sides to the rear of the listener. I would think the ability of the 650 tweeter to be positioned exactly at or close to 90 degrees would make it easier to place those in-ceiling rear speakers closer to the listener than the 7000’s while respecting the tweeter sweet spot.

Shopit,

Welcome to the forum and congrats on selecting GoldenEar Technology. We are pretty fond of their products here. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of members using the Invisa series speakers, so hands on knowledge will be limited.

The Moderator may have been referring to creating the equilateral triangle from your primary listening position with the speakers. In other words, the distance between the speakers should be equal to the distance to the primary listening position. Make sense? If you're sitting 10 feet away from the speakers, they should be 10 feet apart.

The second reference may have been referring to the difference between a speaker firing directly down at you and sounding like it is right above you, as with the 650, versus the illusion of the sound being all around you with the 7000. The 7000 at the proper distance will almost sound like a tower or bookshelf speaker placed at a normal listening height (ear level). GET played the HTR-7000s at a trade show and had industry professionals thinking the sound was coming from a pair of tower speakers. The 7000 also uses the same drivers as the Aon 3, which is a fantastic speaker that I enjoy very much. It also appears to have a fairly robust crossover network. I intend to use four of them for an Atmos set-up once I have my other seven channels and amplification taken care of and the new sound format wars are settled.

Whatever you decide, I have no doubt it will sound great. Please share your results with pictures and descriptives of the sound so that other shoppers may benefit from your experience. Thank you again for joining us! Happy hunting!

Cheers,

T Cobe

As GoldenEar recommends mounting the fronts (at least) a foot from the wall, if I am sitting nine feet from the speakers or ten feet from the wall, should the separation be nine or ten feet?

If “by the proper distance” you mean the nine foot distance either to the sides or the rear of couch to accommodate the 30 degree tweeter angle, then I simply do not have the space. I was hoping to produce a similar effect by pivoting the 650 tweeter some and mounting them a couple feet behind the couch. Do you know the maximum angle the 650 tweeter can attain?