Many homeowners would love to have a great audio room and Dolby Atmos surround sound system but often don’t have a spare room to build a dedicated theater. In this showcase, we’re going to show you how we set up a fantastic audio and immersive Dolby Atmos system in a more traditional living room concept using the new MartinLogan Motion line of home theater speakers.

This room is part of the smart home experience center in our Raleigh showroom so it presented some very common living room challenges including glass where side surrounds would normally go, as well as a high-pitched vaulted ceiling where Atmos speakers would normally be installed. We first mapped this room out in our free home theater design tool. If you are building your own room, this is a great place to start to see how your room would layout with your dimensions. Then, our experts modified the design just like they do with our store and online customers to adjust for the glass and vaulted ceiling. We’d been working with MartinLogan on the launch of their new Motion series and knew it would be ideal for providing great two-channel audio in this room and solving our room challenges to give us great immersive spatial audio as well.

Home Theater LCR Speakers

We used MartinLogan’s new Motion XT F200 Towers for our left and right front speakers. This is the top-of-the-line model and they are striking in the gloss black finish. MartinLogan also offers a walnut and satin white finish in all of the new Motion models. These have the larger Gen2 Obsidian Folded Motion XT Tweeter with the midrange using that cool Nomex Reinforced Kevlar driver, with three 8” aluminum cone woofers. The Folded Motion tweeter design works somewhat like an accordion. The super thin film-folded diaphragm squeezes air and requires almost 90% less excursion than a dome tweeter which drastically reduces distortion. You get a wide, yet very controlled dispersion pattern with this driver which gives you an amazing sound stage.

The downward firing ports in the F200 made them great for this space. This gave us a lot more flexibility in placement as we did not have to worry about a rear-firing port interacting with the back wall. And we just love the way MartinLogan set up the outriggers for this series - they are super easy to get them locked in and level with easy-to-adjust feet. It also makes them really stable which keeps the image rock solid even during passages with a lot of bass energy. The 90-degree horizontal dispersion pattern on the tweeter covers every position in our seating area for this room whereas the 45-degree vertical dispersion reduces unwanted reflections from the ceiling and floor.

We chose the matching C100 center channel with the same Gen2 Obsidian Folded Motion XT Tweeter and Nomex Reinforced Kevlar drivers. We like the fact the cabinet on both of the new Motion centers is angled on one side, which allows you to either have it sitting flat if it is higher up under a screen, or like in this case, where the cabinet is low, we have it angled up.

Home Theater Atmos & Surround Speakers

As you look around this room, you can see there are some challenges for the surround and Atmos speakers. With all of the flexibility in this new series, we came up with a great solution.

This room has a glass door right where the side surround would normally go. This creates a similar situation that many customers have where they either have glass or an opening where you would normally place side surrounds. While every room is different, we solved this challenge similar to how we solve it for most customers by putting the side surrounds in the back corners, which is right around the 110-degree angle used in the Dolby spec.

The other challenge in this room that is also very common is having the high pitch vaulted ceiling, which is not ideal for Atmos speakers. The new Motion series has a unique speaker called the MP10 Multi-Purpose Speaker that is ideal for situations like this. This speaker is what we call a solution speaker, meaning that it provides a solution for many of the common room challenges. The speaker has a 20-degree angle which means that it can be placed high on a wall and provide Atmos effects that are coming from the correct height position in the room.

Let's start with the front speakers. Using the Anthem 1140 8K Home Theater Receiver, we are able to choose front on-wall height speakers. This tells the receiver that the speakers are essentially at the top of the front wall. With the 20-degree angle on the speakers and the dispersion pattern of the Folded Motion Tweeter, they play right into the seating area with no frequency roll-off issues. We then placed a matching pair in the rear for our rear height speakers, again selecting Back On-Wall in the Anthem menu. Since we were unable to place speakers to the sides of the seating area, we have an opportunity to enhance the entire immersion of the room by adding another pair of MP10s to the sides of the seating area. Now, we want to select Middle In-Ceiling in the Anthem for these speakers. You might first think that we should be selecting something on the wall. However, the side walls are close enough that these speakers actually sit within the Dolby spec for a pair of in-ceiling atmos speakers as if the room were slightly wider. The cool thing about this setup is that we were able to test all of the speakers in different configurations in the Anthem to actually demonstrate how great an immersion you get in this setup. We have a strong bedlayer of speakers with the front three combined with the height dimension from the other three pairs of MP10s.

Home Theater Subwoofer & Receiver Calibrations

Then when you run it on the entire system, it also phase aligns the subs with the other speakers providing you insane three-dimensional imaging and accurate frequency response across your listening positions. If you were using the room for only one listening position, one of these subs would have been sufficient, but by adding the second sub we were able to get even bass response across all the listening positions. We set up this room with two profiles in the Anthem, one that uses just the left and right speakers and subs for stereo listening and the other that uses all of the speakers for full Atmos and DTS movies and music.

Even after being an Anthem dealer for over a decade, it still amazes us every time we hear how big of an improvement ARC Genesis makes in most rooms. We find that most people prefer to increase the room gain or bass boost a bit in their ARC Genesis calibrations which was also true in this room.

Final Thoughts

What this set up proved more than anything, is the new MartinLogan Motion line has the flexibility in speaker choices to take a room like this one, that is so far from perfect, and with the right planning and calibration, give you remarkable sound that just makes you forget about everything happening around you except what is going on in the movie.

If you are thinking about building a home theater or updating yours, be sure to check out Home Theater Central, including our free 3D home theater designer where you can design your system, see lots of videos of complete installations like this one, and browse our inspiration gallery and how-to videos.

At Audio Advice, we've been designing and installing high-performance home theaters & smart home systems for our customers in North Carolina and the surrounding areas for decades. In fact, we've delivered more custom theaters than anyone in the Southeast! We are now offering Home Theater Design no matter where you live in the United States! If you are interested in a custom home theater or upgrading your current system, give us a call at 888.899.8776, chat with us, or stop by our award-winning showrooms. We can't wait to help you build your ultimate home theater!

We can't wait to help you build your ultimate home theater!

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