Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems DSP 5000 speaker stands and use as side speakers

Adam,

the ITU-R is a branch of the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union. www.itu.int
The R in this case mean "Radiocommunication".

Many of the telecommunication facilities host "real" reference multichannel studios and are very active in sound research (for example on sound compression formats).

The paper also mentiones on the bottom various unions of which certain standards were considered and which have led to this recommendation.

Many believes are shared as well in the
EBU (Euopean Broadcasting Union)
SMPTE (Society for Motion Picture and Televison Experts)
AES (Audio Engineering Society)
as I understood it.

Honestly, I am not the expert, but the ITU recommendations are the only real international recommendations available as I understood some articles and which are even used by Sony and others in SACD demonstrations e.g. That's why the sound-engineers (Tonmeisters) have made up that paper. I'd call it excellent indepth and free advice.

One further note: You won't find the picture of the 7 speaker layout in that paper (unless they added it). Look at Richard's homepage. He posts in here. On his homepage you find the pictures as well. The 5.1 and the 7.1 pictures are underlying the same principles.

Of course this is all just a recommendation.
You have to find your way, how you like it.

Personally, I would go for the 5.1 layout and add just a single 6th channel in the center back location, if I could. Unfortunately, I don't have enough space for a single hard center back channel speaker to sound good, so I went for two speaker at a 135 degrees spread. This of course nicely fits the Meridian 7 channel system. Maybe one day they also offer the option in the software just for one hard center back channel speaker. I know, you can always just attach on speaker, since both carry the same signal in EX (you would have to add 3 db), but I don't know what happens nowadays with Meridian EZ developed for 7.1 !

Cheers,

Andreas