That REALLY depends on the size, shape, and acoustics of your room.
(In your case the shape of the room and how wide your row of seats is in relation to that.)
And it depends on whether you
USUALLY listen from one spot or have a relatively large seating area.
It also depends on the sort of content you listen to.
And, to be quite candid, it depends on how much you notice the difference.
So, for example....
- if you have a really deep narrow room then a third pair of heights may help provide "a solid image on top"
- if you have a really wide shallow room then Front Widths may offer a significant benefit
- obviously more speakers will matter much more for watching Tora Tora Tora than for watching Johnny Carson reruns
- if you always sit in one spot, right in the center, everything might sound great with just something like 5.1.2 or 5.1.4
The other thing, which really is worth mentioning, is that different people care more about different things.
For example some people on this forum seem to care a great deal about "the width and depth of the sound stage in stereo".
Personally, while I can certainly tell how wide the sound stage is in a stereo performance, I simply don't care all that much.
I'm personally much more concerned that each instrument sounds right than I am about exactly where it appears in the sound stage.
Yet, for other people, the sound stage is very important.
Having as many speakers as possible helps to "pin sounds to where they belong".
This helps to produce a realistic and stable image if you tend to move around...
And it helps ensure that, if you have a relatively large listening area, everyone will hear things coming from the same place, regardless of where they're sitting.
The easiest example of this is a center channel speaker.
If you're sitting in a chair, properly positioned dead center from left to right, you
DO NOT need a center channel speaker.
If you have a good pair of speakers, set up correctly, in a room with good acoustics, you should have a perfect solid "phantom center image".
(Things like vocalists, that should be stage center, will sound like exactly that.)
HOWEVER, if you walk around, or have people sitting off to the sides, a center channel speaker will make a
BIG difference by "pinning things to the center".
(Things will tend to stay centered, or at least stay
towards the center, when you move around, and from different locations in the room.)
(Without that center channel speaker, if you move off center, even a little bit, that "phantom center" doesn't work well at all.)
The bottom line answer to your question is simple.
If you have two pairs of height speakers...
And you can hear things above you moving smoothly from front to rear when they're supposed to...
Then, in your room, things are working as they should, and you're not going to gain much by adding another pair of height speakers.
(In your example, with one row of seats, you probably don't need another pair of heights.)
And, likewise, if you hear surround sound coming pretty much from all around you...
And you don't notice "a dead space off to the sides on the front"...
Then you probably won't gain much by adding front wide speakers.
If you look at Dolby's diagrams...
The purpose of "front wides" is NOT to make the front wall wider...
In terms of angle they are located at the "45 degree angle" half-way between the surrounds and the front mains.
They're intended to...
- "make sure the sound wraps smoothly around you"
- and "to make sure there isn't a gap in the front corners between the front channels and the surrounds".
Is going from 4 to 6 heights worth it in your opinion?
Or front wides are considered to be better?
Or neither are really worth it?
It would be all done to Dolby spec in dedicated room (for one row of seats)
) so in a bid to preserve this state, if in fact true, I could just manually re-do all options of previous owner rather than factory reset to start fresh?
