Multiple surrounds and homemade bipoles

[Texitura]

I have a 5.1 system and my surrounds are small Onkyos from a HTIB. My room is pretty small, and the surrounds are slightly behind and above me, but they're not very far away. Now that I've upgraded my fronts, I have 2 extra surrounds, and I've been thinking about doubling up. I'd mount them a foot or two apart and wire each pair in series to get a more diffuse sound. And then I thought, if I mount each pair of speakers back to back, wouldn't they be sort of "homemade" bipoles?

As soon as I can figure out a mounting system, I'll experiment with it. Just wondering if anyone has ever tried anything similar.

[Fors*]

How about your receiver, can you do 7.1? This would be better than splitting the signal to 2 speakers from each one of the surrounds on the receiver (I think this is what you are saying, if your receiver can only do 5.1) Correct?

[Hammie]

Originally Posted by Texitura

I have a 5.1 system and my surrounds are small Onkyos from a HTIB. My room is pretty small, and the surrounds are slightly behind and above me, but they're not very far away. Now that I've upgraded my fronts, I have 2 extra surrounds, and I've been thinking about doubling up. I'd mount them a foot or two apart and wire each pair in series to get a more diffuse sound. And then I thought, if I mount each pair of speakers back to back, wouldn't they be sort of "homemade" bipoles?

As soon as I can figure out a mounting system, I'll experiment with it. Just wondering if anyone has ever tried anything similar.

Be careful and make sure that you receiver can handle the Ohms. Running speakers in series will effectively double the ohms, i.e., 2 8 ohm speakers will draw a 16 ohm load.

Additionally, if you wire them in parallel, you will effective half the ohm load, i.e., 2 8 ohm speakers will produce a 4 Ohm load.

You would be best to run two wires (aka, bi-wire) one to each speaker from your receiver. Just make sure they are the same ohms.

Additionally, building on what forsberg said, if your receiver has A+B surrounds, you can wire them each to a post and not worry about the series/parallel issues.