[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.