Turn Speakers Upside-Down When Mounted High?

Yikes! You made a plan for your living room based on what you’ve seen on TV and in other homes. This has your TV higher than the recommendations. But it isn’t too late for the speakers. They have to be mounted around the TV for aesthetic reasons. The general advice is that speakers should have their tweeters placed at ear level. That’s out of the question in your current setup. But you could get them closer…if you turn your speakers upside-down! So, should you do it? Since your TV is too high, should you mount your speakers upside-down?

Try It Out

If your speakers are on a shelf or a speaker stand, the easy thing to do is to try it out. It costs nothing and you can hear the difference for yourself. The speaker doesn’t care if it is mounted upside-down or right-side-up. It will produce sound just fine.

But…

In-Wall Speakers

Chances are that you are here because you don’t have the “test it out” option. Your speakers will be mounted in the wall and you want to know if they’ll sound weird upside-down. While we can’t know for sure, we can make a few educated guesses.

Chances are you aren’t sitting remarkably close to your speakers. Most TVs that are mounted high are above a fireplace. This puts most seats fairly far away (ten or more feet). On top of that, most of the time speakers are mounted fairly close to the display. There may or may not be a center speaker.

Go Ahead

None of the above may be true in your case. That’s fine, our advice is the same. Go ahead and mount your speakers upside-down. Sonically, they will sound fine. There can be problems with placing your speakers on their side, but upside-down should sound remarkably similar (if not exactly the same) as right-side-up.

The only time we would say you definitely should mount your speakers upside-down is when they are very near the ceiling. If the tweeter is very near the ceiling, it will create a reflection that would be sonically harmful. In that case, mount them upside-down for sure. Otherwise, it is totally up to your personal preference.

This Guy Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About

Someone is furious in the comments right now. They may not have hit “post” yet, but they are thinking about it. They are SURE that an upside-down speaker will sound different than a right-side-up one.

Oh yeah?

Test it out. If you’ve got speakers on stands, it is usually easy enough to flip them over. Obviously, don’t do this with floorstanding speakers as this will put the tweeter far too close to the floor (just like being too close to the ceiling). But for any stand or shelf-mounted speaker, flip it over and see how much different it sounds.

Zero different.