Greetings,
I recently hooked up a 5.1 surround sound system to my Xbox, and I’m having an immense amount of trouble finding out where I should place the speakers. For the right surround speaker, I’ve seen recommendations anywhere from 90° to 150° right of center, to “Meh, as long as it’s somewhere to the back and right, who cares?”. This doesn’t just apply to the surround speakers either, I’ve even seen different recommended placement of the front left/right speakers. Different companies seem to have different standards for where to put them too. Dolby, DTS, and THX all seem to have their own charts for recommended speaker placements. However, I’m not entirely concerned about what their specifications are. Most of these recommendations are for music or movie type media anyways. They aren’t going to have that extraordinary precision when it comes to exact xyz coordinates of where the sound is originating from the way a video game can.
What I’m concerned with is how Halo 5 is set up to pump out audio. For example if a grenade blows up 90° to my right, will it come out of the surround right speaker with 100% intensity, or will it come out of the front right and surround right speakers with 50% intensity each? Depending on where the speakers are placed, this could cause some confusion on where exactly the sound is coming from.
I am hoping that someone could get in touch with the audio department to give us some insight on what the optimal speaker placement for Halo 5 is. Does Halo 5 use it’s own formula, or does it use some sort of industry standard? Does Bitstream encoding have any impact on placement, or is it universal between uncompressed/Dolby/DTS? Does the recommended speaker placement change when going from 5.1 to 7.1, or do you just add 2 more speakers to the current setup? Is Halo 5 set up for Dolby Atmos? How does it decide which speaker to send the sound to?
Any information is appreciated, so that we can set up our speakers to pump out positional audio with as close to 100% accuracy as possible. Thank you for your time.