Adding 5th channel speaker to 4.1 Klipsch's?

[qball]

I have been thinking about the details of the 6.2 setup and I haven't reached any perfect setup in my mind yet. Here are my thoughts:

In all cases switch your LR speakers with the improved ones from the 2.1 set.

Keep your standard 4.1 setup as it would be normally setup, add the 2.1 setup as Dan described. This may introduce an interference pattern in the room for the center channel as you have 2 identical mono sources. I don't feel like breaking out my waves/optics textbook and going through the equations, at the moment, but it could be an issue depending on the setup. Additionally, you have 2 subwoofers, but one of them is dedicated to the center channel + LFE, which essentially means that it is wasted for everything that doesn't have 5.1 encoding.

You can fix the first problem by using only one speaker for your center channel. The problem now is that your center channel is very much underpowered because you have 4x 60W for everything else, and only 35W for the center. This probably won't be an issue unless you're cranking it, however. If you can bridge the amp on the 2.1 then you could get 70W out of it, which seems pretty good to me. I'm not sure whether the 2.1 amp would like to be bridged or not, someone who knows the design would have to comment on that.

Now there's still the issue of the subwoofer. Personally, I'd be of the opinion that you should be able to share subwoofers somehow so that you can use both all the time. Or perhaps you could set it up so that you have a front and rear subwoofers ala the 4.2 setup, or right/left setup that might be worth considering.

With this costing $200 I was also thinking it might be possible to get a 60-100W mono amp and the center speaker for the quintets and perhaps get better results for about the same price. I dunno, it's a toss up. Any thoughts?

-Q