HUGE Spacious Surrounds - The

Certified audiograms may be the best objective way to test hearing. Unfortunately, I'm only aware of OSHA type certified testing at 500Hz, 1K, 2K, 3K, 4K and 6K.

Test CD's can get beyond that, but a SLM would have to be used to determine threshold values at each frequency.

This could be helpful setting a system up after flattening out the room by with ARC or a CD and SML.

If someone has a 20 dB bilateral loss at 3, 4, and 5K Hz, adding 20 dB's at those frequencies should provide a flat response to the listener. Unilateral losses could be adjusted on that side only, etc.

Music jumps out when I cup both hands behind my ears. It seems to gather shorter treble wavelengths best. There's alot of interesting individual components to nice sound reproduction.

When voicing my custom built speakers with a test disk, I notice that my hearing runs out of steam at about 15000Hz, while my speakers and sound pressure meter keep going up to at least 21500Hz.

What I can hear sounds pretty good though. :o)

I've often felt that the Bose 901s would make good surrounds, especially with analog Dolby ProLogic, or if you can't go with 7.1. Properly set up they should definitely fill in the back half of the room. With digital you'd definitely want to use the active equalizer to get some treble.

However, time does march on. These days, for a small unobtrusive surround with room-filling hemispherical dispersion and a light, airy treble, I much prefer the Mirage Omnisat satellites, or OMD-5s.

Knownothing: My Tandberg 3011A FM tuner, I believe, only goes up to 15K Hz, yet, sounds great to me. Numbers seem to only tell half the story. My quest to find a simple tuner with a spinning tuning dial luckily introduced me to this subject. The difference in sound quality between a Tandberg tuner and my reciever's tuner was a great, unexpected wake-up call. My goal is to improve a very musical system with much, much better surrounds. There's alot going on back there. Ideally, the fronts and mains focused and blended together, and the surrounds seemingly everwhere else yet not overpowering at all.

Johnnyb53: Both surrounds looked good to me, too, especially the OMD-5's after I read more reviews. I was also quite impressed by the Paradigm Signature ADP3 v2 Surround / Dipole Speaker. Bass is direct and mids/trebles are reflected bi-directionally front and rear. 901's surrounds with a upgraded EQ still has my processor thinking.

Large, yes. Hung up on the ceilings, maybe not too intrusive, at least in a large room and painted flat white to match the vaulted ceiling. 901's are relatively lightweight, too. One firm installation point on a ceiling support with a small stainless steel chain/fittings, and I can rotate and adjust heights of the 901's for locating the best surround reproduction positions.

My processor allows on-the-fly volume adjustments of all speakers on the front panel and remote, including the sub in multi-channel. I should be able to balance both audiophile quality music first and major HT audio with the right EQ on the 901's and some luck. Luckily, I live in a single detached home where I can do this.

RF-7's wired in mono for a center is a huge waste. Why don't you use the RF-7's as your surrounds, they would be much better used that way. RF-7's are killer speakers.