I have a crazy idea. I'd like to know whether it's a useless crazy idea, or an imperfect but potentially useful crazy idea. I doubt I'll actually implement it any time soon, but if it's potentially useful I'll keep it in mind for my next home theater upgrade.

My HT setup is in a 22' x 12' room. The room has a peaked ceiling, so at the 12' walls the ceiling is a bit below 8' and at the midpoint of the 22' walls the ceiling is considerably higher (I haven't measured, but I'd guess about 14').

The display is on one of the 12' wall, essentially centered. Above it (at about 5'6"), I have an in-wall center speaker (Axiom VP100). Same wall also has in-wall main speakers (Axiom M22s). Midpoint of each 22' wall has on-wall side surrounds, at about 7' or 8' (Axiom M0s). Rear wall has in wall rear surrounds at about 5'-6" (Axiom M2s). I also have a cheap 10" subwoofer in the mix. I am using an Outlaw 1070.

One of the 22' walls has a ton of glass (sliding doors to the back yard, and peaked windows above that). The other 22' wall has a passthrough cutout to the kitchen, and a large passageway to the dining room. I assume this creates some equalization issues.

When watching video, the side surround placement is also non-ideal, as our primary listening position is a couch about 2 feet off of the back wall. That puts the side surrounds well forward of our listening position.

Ok, so here's my crazy idea:

What if I used the 1070 as a pre-pro, and connected LCR directly to amps as usual. Side surround pre-outs would be split with Y-connectors, with one leg going to the side-surround amps. The rear surround pre-outs and the other legs of the Y-connectors from the side surround pre-outs would go to a mixing board. The rear-right amp would get the rear-right pre-out with a bit of the side-right signal mixed it. Same story with the rear-left.

My idea is that this would sort of give me a phantom side surround that is more appropriately placed. Obviously it's imperfect - the only thing I've done in "spreading" the side signals between speakers is adjust amplitude. No adjustment for phase or delay.

Is this a quick and dirty hack that might be useful, or is the lack of phase and delay adjustment likely to doom the results?

If this is a potentially useful project, to one-up it, I'd replace the 1070 with a pre-pro with room correction (in part to address the inherent room issues in my setup, but also to address any additional issues that might crop up from my hack)... like, say, the 978, if it's ever released.

Thoughts?

I have a little experience with setting up audio mixers for sound reinforcement and my experience is that even fairly simply mic'ed conferences and such do not benefit from merely "blending" output that listeners are expecting to come from various sides of the stage. You need to have what people see match what they hear or intellegiability is reduced...

The "magic" of even old fashioned Dolby LCRS channel sound had a great deal to do with Dolby sound engineers helping the audio designers to both record an adequate number of production tracks as well decide in post production how to "steer the mix" so that a convincingly surround experenice was achieved.

I suppose you might be able to play with an a slightly more complicated mixer setup that would allow you to alter phase and time delay but I suspect that you'd quickly make everything sound both over processed and potentially very noisy...