Alternative speaker arrangements for the 5.1 speaker format
Non-Directional Listening

There are a variety of speaker formats that one can do with 5 or 6 full range speakers. The standard speaker arrangement for watching movies as well as listening to music is the ITU-775 (International Telecommunications Union: http://www.itu.ch). This format was selected for a few reasons: best envelopment of the listener, more closely matches the home listener's actual speaker arrangement, and because the human ear (on average) doesn't hear things directly behind them as well as they do in the 150 degree arch in front of them.

This means that the listener(s) should be located in the "sweet" spot and looking directly in front of them. This is great for a few people where there is a central location from which one's attention is directed.

I'm proposing that for music and other more abstract sonic art forms, a number of speaker arrangements can be used.

While in a more informal setting say a get together with 10 people in a living room. There doesn't seem to be a point of focus from which to listen to music, or if they're a point of focus, he's wearing a lamp shade on his head. For these situations I would like to recommend the pentagon speaker format. It's a variation on the quad and ITU setups. Simply put, you place the speakers at every 72 degrees to form a pentagon. Put the subwoofer in the center of the pentagon or off to one side if the room sounds uneven. Don't be afraid to use your ears but a spectrum analyzer helps.

This format is geared for non-directional listening. Most music produced is mixed with the center front position the point of focus. I, being an ambient electronic music kind of guy, am currently working on my next album where there is no real point of focus or put more correctly the point of focus changes constantly (like the real world).

More later...

I wrote this article a number of months ago but was hesitant to put it up. I decided to put it up and was looking around for some links and other support material and found the idea has already been presented in a much better form: