is doing a 7.1 setup with 6 mozart grands over kill?

[danhawk]

just wandering or shoulf i use the mozarts fot the front and the haydens for mids and rears or the waltz grands for mids and rears. the othe option i was thinking was doing the main 6 with waltz.

OR If i were to go with the martin logan clarity for the fronts what would watch well for the mids and rears

[mulveling]

Surround information should be more subtle rather than being pounded into your skull - I'd keep the majority of money invested in the front 2 or 3, but then I'm a 2ch guy so take that with a grain of salt. It's best to have the front 3 identical (meaning an identical tower for center rather than a horizontal center), but can you really manage that with a TV in the middle?

Front 2/3 and the subwoofer will have the biggest impact on overall quality, so keep most of your money there. Haydens should make super surrounds, and it may be easier to position them properly which will make a bigger difference anyways.

[Ty]

Something I've learned over the years: don't go cheaper on your rears. Common wisdom dictates this over and over but people don't know what they're missing. My rears are a smaller cheaper model in the line of speakers I use and are less than half as expensive. I recently swapped the fronts and rears for space reasons and I find I actually like the way the whole system sounds better now because the disperson is better and the overall sonic signature more mellow coming from the rear soundstage. The front didn't seem to suffer either though I can't explain why. The big floorstanders seem to have trouble with room interaction when they were in the front but the bookshelves aren't having this problem so it was a win both ways.

Moral of the story: if you can afford it go with the same model all around especially if you're doing DVD-Audio/SACD.