Rear Speaker question

[ryk]

I purchased the Pioneer VSX 1015TXK Receiver to Replace my fried Sony Receiver. The Pioneer is a 7.1 Receiver. Got it for 449.00 Here are my questions.


My room does not have the ergonomics for 2 back rear speakers to accommodate the 7.1 just yet, but 1 would fit perfectly in the back center of the wall. Can I do this??
I really dont need to split the back rear to stereo my room really is not that big, 20 X 13.
Will 1 center rear work ?? My 2 side surrounds are set about 2 feet back from the listening area about 7 feet up the wall. I'm thinking the Center surround would be the same height directly in back of the listener. The back wall is about 4 feet away.

I have paradigms all around..9se Mains, Center and Sub with Atoms for my surrounds.
My second question is ;
Can I use a different speaker for the rear center. Any suggestions?? Should I get a small center speaker for the rear or just go with another Atom?

[thekid]

Most advice I have read says it is best that your speakers match so I would stick with the Paradigms. IMO I'd use another Atom. I'm not familar with Paradigm but am guessing their center channels are more expensive than the surrounds plus if you bought a pair of Atoms you can use one now and then both of them at a later date when you go to 7.1

[evil__betty]

A neat function of that receiver is that if you only have a 5.1 system right now, and your front speakers have 4 binding posts, you can bi-amp your receiver using the un-used 7.1 speaker wires. There is a setting under the "surround back' speaker set up to allow you to either bi-amp, 2nd zone, or just have them regular. If your speakers will accommodate it, I would reccommend using that until you have a larger roomto put the full 7.1 system in.

Cheers

[vxaudio]

i have 1 rear center and it sounds great. set your receiver to 6.1. 6.1 soundtracks are at thats out now anyway. with 2 rears, they arejust mono and split the back center channel.

[Woochifer]

The whole reason for going with two back surround speakers in the first place is because of how differently we hear things behind us. It simply comes down to the shapes of our ears and how the sound waves from behind get diffracted.

If your room has any issues at all with accommodating the back surround speakers, I would highly recommend that you forget about them and just focus on getting the 5.1 alignment as optimized as possible. 99.9% of DVDs on the market have no ES or EX back surround encoding, so the feature is only used on a very small minority of movie soundtracks, which are predominantly mixed for 5.1 playback.

Trying to squeeze any back surround speakers into an inadequate space will make your system sound worse.