[yamtaddle]

The biggest problem with home theater setups with surround sound, IME, is that no matter what you do most of the seats will get very uneven sound (typically, one or more surround speakers being much louder than the others). The only fix is to have a larger space so the effective "sweet spot" covers more of your seating (think: an large-aisle-width space around a 3x2 seat configuration) but at that point you're looking at sacrificing a mid-sized living room worth of square footage for those 6 total viewing seats (and even more, if you scale up from there).

[EDIT] In case it's not clear, the core problem is that for some seats, without a large buffer between the seating area and the speakers, the nearest surround speaker will be like 5-10% as far away as the farthest one. No amount of room-correction can help much for most of the seats in such an arrangement. All you can do is use a larger space so you can put the speakers farther away without changing the size of the seating area (so, add empty buffer space around the seating area) so the difference in relative distance between the farthest and nearest surround speakers is smaller.

[toast0]

I'm in the middle of a dedicated theater room project. We're doing 5 seats behind 4 seats, which is probably more than we'll likely use, but it does have the benefit of expected use will have people farther away from the side speakers.

Depending on the seating costs and budget and other things, I think it makes sense to go ahead and put seats around the sides... in case you end up having extra guests, they can sit in comfort, even if the audio isn't ideal.

On a small budget, you can do a lot with just two decent speakers rather than speakers built into an ultra thin flat panel. Thrift stores often have nice speakers that may not be visually pleasing but are likely to be aurally pleasing.

[yamtaddle]

> On a small budget, you can do a lot with just two decent speakers rather than speakers built into an ultra thin flat panel. Thrift stores often have nice speakers that may not be visually pleasing but are likely to be aurally pleasing.

This is very true, almost any separate speaker is going to be better than TV speakers, especially in the age of flat panels.

And one thing software room-compensation can do is let you build a surround system with mismatched speakers, without having to lose a day manually tweaking levels. No need to buy a full 7.1 or 7.2 set at once. Thrift decent pairs of speakers and orphaned subwoofers and let the software figure it out.