The Benefits of Having Your Speakers Behind a Projector Screen

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Introduction

As George Lucas once said “Sound is half the picture”. This is certainly true when you’re building a home cinema: sound is a critical element in bringing that proper movie theatre feel into your home.

The question of whether you should put speakers in front of or behind a projector screen is one people need to make, and it’s something people generally need to decide before construction happens – or they need to reconstruct their rooms to accommodate. In this article, I review why it makes sense to put speakers behind an Acoustically Transparent screen, and why I personally made the choice to do this for my own home cinema.

The Pros of Putting Speakers Behind a Projector Screen

Sound Effects Are In Their Correct Plate

When the dialogue is not coming out of the screen where the actors are, but under or over your screen, your home cinema can sound a bit dis-jointed. Putting the speakers behind an Acoustically Transparent screen gets around all these issues, and allows the sound to emanate from the screen, joining the sound with the action.

To be frank, this is probably the biggest impact of having installed speakers behind my projector screen. The focus is now solely on the action on the screen, and it feels like being there with the actors, as opposed to listening to sound coming from elsewhere.

The other part of this equation is sound-panning across the front sound-stage. Instead of the sound travelling from left – down / up – right, the sound is smoothly panned from left to right and back. This allows surround sound elements to move more seamlessly across the front sound-stage, which removes another distracting element and helps immersion.

Employing Larger Horn-Loaded Speakers

One of the very first things we did when putting speakers behind the screen was design our own, larger speakers. By employing compression drivers and massive 10″ midrange drivers, we were able to get a massive boost in clarity and give our home cinema the perfect tonal quality – just like at the movies.

Commercial Cinemas also use compression drivers for the higher frequencies, and these tend to have a particular sound signature. By dropping tweeters and switching to compression drivers, we gained a massive increase in speaker sensitivity and dynamism, that tweeters are simply not capable of. Every tiny nuance of the soundtrack is now heard with incredible clarity and the same tonal signature as at the movies. Now I am blown away at the sound every time I listen to my system, and dialogue is clearer than ever.

The Ability to Have a Baffle Wall

What this also enabled was to design an “infinite baffle wall”. I have written at length about the benefits of it here. However, in summary, a baffle wall allows the sound to stay in front of the speaker, and gets rid of unwanted interference at the front of the room as the sound-waves are launched into the room. This is what the best commercial cinemas employe and it gives the sound a clarity that cannot be experienced otherwise in smaller closed spaces.

While I am very much familiar with the baffle wall, I am not up to my full baffle wall build, but my co-designer Tyler already installed the full baffle-wall, and loves it. I am waiting for the subwoofer drivers to arrive now that we locked down the X subwoofer design, which is the eXtreme version of our subwoofer design, so I can install that on the front sound-stage. It’s the thinnest subwoofer designed with a 15″ high-performance driver, and I cannot wait, even though I have two REL Predators already.

Better Sound Clarity

When you put speakers – especially the centre speaker – under or over your projector screen, you ultimately compromise the front sound-stage in a few ways:

1. If the speaker is not oriented the right way, the sound is going to sound muffled
2. There is more opportunity for destructive room interaction due to the speaker or speakers being closer to the floor or ceiling. This can rob the sound of clarity and result in difficulty understanding dialogue.
3. The sound might not clear the first row of seats if you have multiple rows of seating, severely compromising the sound in the back seats.

Putting speakers behind an Acoustically Transparent screen solves these issues and allows the sound to have greater clarity, as long as you put the space – and your budget – to good use. As I said, this is why we designed our DIY speakers so we could make use of every inch and dollar to increase performance. However, you can use suitable branded speakers or pick another DIY design. The main thing is that you don’t just fling your old crappy speakers behind the screen and expect them to sound better all of a sudden. You do need to invest more to gain more.

Looks

I actually think that having speakers behind a screen simply looks better. You don’t have big or ugly speaker boxes in the room, and you can just focus on the experience. The room can look a lot less cluttered and a more inviting space, especially if you can also hide your equipment.

The Cons of Having Speakers Behind a Projector Screen

The major drawback of putting speakers behind an acoustically transparent projector screen is that you do need to build the room so you have space behind your screen. I explained this process at the end of this article: Build Your Own Baffle Wall for Your Home Theatre.

Additionally, you do have some drawbacks from both an audio and visual perspective which I detailed in my article on whether you Should You Install an Acoustically Transparent Screen, which I’d recommend as further reading. But in summary:

1. A reduction in brightness if going for a woven screen
2. An introduction of some audio interference including high-frequency loss and comb filtering
3. Theoretically, you could get visual artefacts if you install the wrong screen or install the right screen the wrong way, but this is not something I have personally experienced, and neither did my colleague, Tyler using exactly the same screen material but building it DIY.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the above issues are minor compared to what you do gain:

• In my case, both the audio and video quality actually improved because I invested in larger – and better – speakers, and also a higher-quality screen.
• Tyler, who designed our matching subwoofers for the Simple Home Cinema SHC10 speaker line, had the same concerns, and ended up with both a massive uplift in sound and picture quality. He switched from an Elite Screens Cinewhite to the XYScreens Soundmax 4K and found it to be both sharper and higher contrast than the Cinewhite. He also found that the speakers we designed and built actually brought the best sound he had experienced in a home theatre until that point, certainly much better than his previous Klipsch speakers, which needed a lot of EQ to sound great. The SHC LCR10s sounded great without EQ, but with EQ completely transformed his sound.

So my advice is that keep an open mind, do the work and:

1. Pick a high-quality screen – Tyler did DIY and I got a pre-fab screen – both with XYScreens Soundmax 4K material which was rated the top during a shootout between 37-odd other materials on AVSForum.
2. Make the best use of the space behind a screen – install the biggest and best speakers your space and your wallet allows. Don’t just put your existing speakers behind the screen.
3. Create a baffle wall if you are up for it, to maximise the sound quality even more.

Lastly, having a proper cinema at home, especially a high-performing one, is a luxury that not many have the expertise to execute well! So pat yourself on the back, sit back and enjoy!

Should you have any questions, book a quick 30min call with us using the link below. We are here to help you select the right screen size, screen type, speakers, receivers and projector to go with your screen. Since we are not affiliated with any specific brands, we can give you unbiased advice. We also publish our DIY guides so people with a lot of time and motivation to learn – but maybe not as much funds dedicated to the hobby – can still create an amazing home cinema experience, so check them out here.

Further Reading

Please refer to the following articles for further reading on the subject:

1. Should You Install an Acoustically Transparent Screen?
2. Selby Encore Acoustically Transparent Screen Review / XYScreens Soundmax 4K Weave?
3. Build Your Own Baffle Wall for Your Home Theatre
4. Elite Screens Cinegrey 3D and Cinegrey 5D Review
5. Designing a High Performing Modular Subwoofer