Home theatre fans know the importance of positioning their speakers just right. To achieve ideal surround sound, whether with a 5.1 or even 7.1 speaker system, speakers should be located at an equal distance from the listening area, and at the right angle as well! For people with smaller lounge rooms this can be tricky though, with wires trailing across the room and speaker stands causing trip hazards. If this sounds like your lounge room right now, there is something you can do about it!

First, to the issue of speaker stands cluttering your lounge. This is most easily solved by installing speaker brackets on your wall or ceiling. Speaker brackets are designed to make setting up home theatre easy, and good ones allow even quite large speakers to be held securely out of the way while providing for the fine adjustments necessary to achieve optimum surround sound. Installing these brackets is generally straight forward, and speakers up to 40 pounds each can be fixed safely to drywall as long as the recommended bolts are used.

The other piece of the puzzle is to get rid o those tangled wires. Two solutions present themselves – if upgrading is an option, wireless speakers are now mature technology with obvious benefits. The alternative is to have an electrician wire a speaker port into your wall, near where you are planning on mounting the speaker. These ports are discreet and tidy and allow you to connect speakers to your home theatre system by routing the cables out of sight, through your wall cavity. Cover plates for the ports have sockets for a range of connectors so you can upgrade down the track if need be. The home handyperson can even install these without professional help, as no live power is involved in most cases.

These measures allow the setup of a compact but high quality home theatre system, without the inconvenience of free standing speakers and cables – for many, this type of setup will be the excuse you have been waiting for to set up your surround sound speakers properly instead of just sticking them in a cabinet!