The space you’ve selected for your home theatre will dictate a lot of your speakers choice. A dedicated home theatre room will give you a lot more choice than a living room. For living room, aesthetics of the room are very important as the set up needs to work well with other interior and not take too much space. For this often integrated or in-wall speakers are best, as they take little space and can be unobtrusive.
Speaker types
For dedicated rooms there’s a lot more flexibility for speakers: over-head ceiling, floor standing, integrated boxes with acoustically transparent screens. Integrated powered or passive units can be installed at an optimum ear height. Building a false wall will accomodate it’s physical dimensions and have a flat aesthetic across the front. Ceiling over-head speakers are the best option for Dolby Atmos dimensional sound, to create those special sound effects. Typically they will be integrated flush mounted. Placing them over head in my experience works better than upwards firing speakers that reflect sound off the ceiling. Four ceiling Dolby Atmos speakers are best, but having two also works well.
In-wall speakers require more installation work to fit them in and conceal all the cabling. Floor standing units will take less to install, and a on-wall system could be a good middle ground between the two, especially when smaller boxes are needed. But typically once the speaker budget is worked out then we work out what would be the best value for that budget when considering options.
Subwoofers
Subwoofers add a lot to a good home theatre system, they add energy you can feel. Having two subwoofers works best in my experience, they balance out the low frequencies across the theatre system. You won’t have to over-drive them and they will provide plenty of sonic impact. Subwoofers are usually big in size. An integrated subwoofer that looks flush with the wall from the front will have a big box going into the wall. These can be installed prior to wall linings, but they also can be retrofitted. Powered subs are the most common, big boxes with 8-14inch drivers.
Brands
Some people prefer to see speakers, like floor standing or wall mounted boxes. It doesn’t detract from the look of the home theatre, just more of a personal preference. Brands like Klipsch, Monitor Audio, Bowers and Wilkins are popular for the floor standing units. Sonance and Monitor Audio do good integrated wall/ceiling/flush mounted speakers. There are lots of great products made by different brands, and its fine to mix and match some speakers. For example your Dolby Atmos could be by one brand, your LCR (left, centre, right) could be another, and a sub by a third brand. Some companies specialise in a particular type of speakers, like Velodyne with subwoofer. Speakers are often made with minimal branding, and if all of them are black boxes, for example, they would look fine together.
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