Various surround setups can be created with the Citation series soundbars (the Citation Bar or Citation MultiBeam 700).
The bar may be expanded with a subwoofer (the Citation Sub or Citation Sub S), the specially designed Citation Surround speakers and/or the Citation Towers. With this, you can create your own wireless 5.1 home theatre setup. While most systems require an amplifier and a bucket full of cables, with the Citation series you only need to supply the devices with power, and for the rest everything can be easily connected wirelessly. Generally speaking, we have the following surround setups:
Depending on the setup you choose, the soundbar will act as a centre or LCR (Left/Centre/Right) speaker. If, for example, you have two Towers standing next to your soundbar, then when playing surround content the Citation Towers will act as the left and right front speakers and the soundbar as the centre speaker. If you only have a Citation Bar or a Citation MultiBeam 700 standing, then the soundbar itself will provide the full sound spectrum.
If you have multiple surround speakers paired with your soundbar, you can use the virtual surround mode. This function can turn stereo into ‘virtual’ surround. You can activate this on the soundbar’s display in the Audio menu or using the surround button on the remote control.
If we look at the setup of the second example (the soundbar + the two Towers), this means that when music is played, in addition to the two Towers (stereo), the soundbar will play as a centre speaker when the virtual surround mode is enabled. At that moment, stereo (2-channel) will be converted into multichannel audio and the sound will be distributed over the paired speakers.
Keep in mind that if the virtual surround mode is not enabled, you will not hear surround when you do not have surround input (a surround sound file). If you play stereo music in the same setup, then only the Citation Towers (+ optional sub) will play if virtual surround mode is disabled.
The surround configuration was designed for sound with picture. This means that when you enable the virtual surround mode, the voices will always come from the front and not (also) from the back (Citation Surround) speakers in a 5.0 of 5.1 setup. This design was chosen because it is generally not pleasant to also hear voices from the back when a person is in front of you. So do not be afraid that the surround speakers are not working if they emit no sound when listening to a dialogue.
To create the optimal 5-channel TV sound experience, make sure that your TV as well as any provider Mediabox settings are properly configured so that the original Bitstream (the original sound file with the best quality) is sent to the soundbar.
To this end, you should not select PCM for the digital output in your TV settings (which only supports 2 channels in uncompressed format), but instead select Automatic or Bitstream. This can have a different name depending on the TV brand (passthrough, multichannel throughput, etc).
Note: The settings of your TV provider must be correctly configured. If, for example, you have a TV decoder box, then it is important to select passthrough or Dolby Digital in the provider settings as well, because if the audio output is set to PCM there, the sound will be converted to stereo before it reaches the TV, and you will no longer be able to select some options in your TV settings.