7.1 Surround Sound

John How is a 7.1 Surround Sound System Laid out in a control room? And what speaker manufacturer(s) should I look into for the speaker components for the system? Ive looked at Genelec's and Mackie's websites but don't know what to look for

There's not exactly a 7.1 system standard set in stone yet. However the commonly (non SDDS) used setup is composed of Front Left, Center, Front Right, Left Surround, Right Surround, Left Rear Surround, and Right Rear Surround. Basically, if you were to look at a the room from above as a clock face, with the listener being the anchor points from the hands, the speakers would be laid out like this:(approximately for demonstration and or explanation purposes) FL=11 o'clock C=12 o'clock FR=1 o'clock LS=9 o'clock RS=3 o'clock LRS=7 o'clock RRS=5 o'clock any help? This is completely different from 6.1 setups where the standard 5.1 setup sees the addition of extra rear center speaker. However, with the current 6.1 encoding formats, the rear center is not discreet and is matrixed from a combo of the rears. Now SDDS, or Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, is a whole different bird with 8 discreet channels. However it has 5 in the front, 2 in the back, and 1 bass unit (sub). They're trying to get rid of the gap as the sound pans across the front of the room. In a lot of ways, especially dealing with phase, this is much better, but it's not used by nearly as many theatres nor home theatres as DTS or Dolby Digital.

Thanks Sam Been playing around with my 3D home architecture again and wanted to design a control room for 7.1 Now that I have the idea of the positioning I think I can come up with something.