7.1 speaker placement might be wrong

[guitarist155]

I am currently an audio engineering student in the final weeks of school, recently i finished classes on pre-post film work and have found something that is quite disturbing as i am working on building my HT. the spec for 7.1 is not really a spec at all and does not give guidelines on speaker placement for mixing or HT use. i know alot of people on here have 7.1 setups and use the common center, FL, FR, mid left, mid right, rear left, rear right. but as I have learned this is not even how speakers are placed for mixing or how mics are setup for recording 7.1 the current placement in the industry has the 2 extra speakers as rear center and high front center ( a few feet above the center) this is also the configuration for imax. a 7.1 mic can be seen here http://www.holophone.com/products.html note that it shows the other channels as es-ex rear center and top front center imax.

this really makes me wonder as not having speakers in the right spot could really mess with where sound is coming from like when the dialog starts coming from your right mid, the origins of the mid left and right come from matrixing the rears so it made sense to have them as mid surrounds but now that we have discrete 7.1 where is the audio truly going to come from?

looks like i will be running conduit to a few more locations