Home Theater Speaker Advice

Consider the best 5 identical monitors/speakers you can buy and a sub instead. My 2 cent's.

Agree with Steuspeed, forget the big main speakers and stay with identical speakers all the way around for the best sound. Let the sub or subs do the bass. In a large room like that you might even want to go with monopoles in the rear, my room is a little larger than yours and this is what worked out best for me, all speakers are at equal distance to my listening area.

I'll offer an alternative perspective. If you like to listen to concert DVDs, etc., where the surround channels are recorded as part of the concert, then I agree with the above recommendations for identical speakers all around. But for the vast majority of movie soundtracks, the surround information is added after-the-fact and is independent of the front channel information. The sound engineer expects a diffuse surround field - most movie theaters have close to a dozen surround speakers. This is why many (most) surround speakers are designed as dipoles.

From my experience, these dipole wall-mounted surround speakers rarely come close to being timbre matched with their corresponding front channel speakers. (the Revel Ultima system I was using in my previous theater is a good example). But the good news is that this doesn't really detract from the home theater experience for the reasons discussed above.

The acoustic energy that your surround speakers must deliver is also significantly lower than the requirements of the front speakers. While you can get away with a monitor speaker for L/R/C, I've found that a full-range speaker at least for L/R will produce a sound that has more impact and is more involving than a monitor/sub. (I still highly recommend a sub for the LFE channel).

So, I'd recommend that you spend most of your money on the L/R/C/sub speakers, and just get some decent speakers for the surround speakers, not necessarily matching the L/R/C or even from the same manufacturer. In my new theater (http://www.jaytorborg.com/home_theather_main.htm), I'm using Revel F50/C50 for L/R/C and a two pairs of inexpensive B&W speakers for the surrounds.

I'm not familiar with the Triangle speakers, but I liked what I heard from the Paradigms.