Upside down speaker? (Tweeter on bottom)

[pmeyer]

Is there any reason that speakers need to be 'right side up'? Assuming the tweeters are at the correct height, can the speakers be mounted upside down?

I'm trying to resolve some space conflicts in my home theater and could use some help.

- I would like identical left/center/right floor standing size speakers behind my AT screen.

- My acoustic consultant (Bryan Pape) recommends a sub dead center on the floor. I'm thinking two HSU VTF-3 MK3's, one front, one rear.

- I need the tweeters of my speakers to be between 42" and 51" off the floor.

With a 21" sub sitting on a 12" stage, I'm up to 33". I've got 20" from the top of my sub to the center of the screen. I can clearly fit a 20" speaker in there.

The question is: is there any acoustical reason I can't mount a floor standing speaker upside down? Tweeter on the bottom just below mid screen, mids and woofers above. Are speakers tuned or designed assuming a specific orientation? What is the downside if they are flipped?

Don't worry about the mechanical aspects of it. Assume I'm building my own speakers and I'll build them plenty strong on top and bottom.

Sorry if this is a newbie question, but it's not one I see commonly asked...

[Kevin P]

As long as the tweeters are as close to ear height as practical, the orientation doesn't matter. Some enclosures have weighted bases which can cause some issues with mounting them upside down, but that's a mechanical, not acoustic issue. If you're building your own speakers you can design them with the tweeter below the mids/woofers if you like. Some speakers have the tweeter in between two mids or woofers.

When installing in-wall speakers, if they're high up I'll mount them upside down to get the tweeters closer to ear height.

[PewterTA]

I turned my friend's B&W Dm602 S3s upside down and the difference was amazing. It was due to the fact that he had them on a shelf up a lot higher than the main seating area...this brough the tweeter about a foot down closer to ear height. The differences were almost a 1dB difference and the over all clarity was a lot better.

As long as you bring the tweeter as close to ear level as possible, there should be no issues unless like Kevin said, they are weighted or rounded on top.

[pmeyer]

Very cool, guys! Just the answer I wanted to hear.

I'm browsing over in the Mission Possible forum. My plan will be to build some good speakers myself and have them upside down behind the screen. Problem solved!

Paul

[Kevin P]

If you build your own, you can position the drivers where you like. In fact, if you're building all 3 front speakers, and want just 1 or 2 of them "upside down", you could just flip the driver positions on those, while keeping the box "right side up". Then the speakers won't look upside down if the grilles hide the drivers.

[pmeyer]

Good point. My leaning is to flip all three for consistency, but no data to back that up.

I'm (very slightly) leaning towards building the speakers identically. The idea would be that if I ever want to pull these speakers out and use them as normal floor standers, I could.

However, that logic sort of fails under close examination: they'll likely be black spray painted MDF boxes, and the center would be vertical. Not very useful in any position except behind an AT screen. In which case upside down is just fine...

I'll think on it.

Thanks!