Amplification and Speakers In Huge Home Theater

I am re-tooling my home theater to get more speaker coverage in my very large room. I do not want to use a subwoofer(s) because of the expense. If I ran subs I would want to run four of them, and I just don’t have the kind of dough for four high-quality subs. Besides I live in a loft with neighbors on both sides…multiple subs would be just too much.

I had been using Infinity Kappa 9 speakers as fronts, center and surrounds. I had been running them with Carver Silver 9t monoblocs. The Kappas are notoriously inefficient power hogs. They are beautiful great sounding speakers, they just need a LOT of power and I’m looking to move on to something more efficient. Also, the Carver monobloc amps are getting up there in age (20 years?), and they may fail soon and I’d like to replace them all with one multi-channel switching amp (Wyred4Sound) and one stereo amp.

I am considering getting four pairs of indentical Cerwin Vega speakers for a 7.1 system. Each of these speaker towers will have two 18 inch woofers per speaker, for a total of eighteen 18 inch woofers in the system. The speakers are rated to go down to 24hz. I will also use one of these speakers as the center channel. Every speaker in the system will be set to “Large”. With that many 18 inch woofers going that low, there will be no need for a sub.

Two (48" tall) front tower speakers will sit on the floor, one on each side of the screen….sixteen feet apart. Another pair of front speakers will sit on the floor along the front side walls about eight feet out into the room, 22 feet apart. I am using an extra pair of front speakers to help fill the room with sound. The four front speakers will be Y-connected to facilitate the two speakers per side.

The surround speakers will be ten feet high off the floor, 22 feet apart, twenty five feet away from the screen.

The back surround speakers will be 35 feet away from the screen, fifteen feet apart and elevated five feet off the floor.

My sitting position is twenty five feet from the screen. Any closer and I get pixelization.

My room is 22 feet wide, 70 feet long and 22 feet high.

My screen is 16 feet wide and 12 feet tall.

Photo of room with screen rolled up

Photo of room with screen rolled down

Photo and specs of Cerwin Vega speakers I want to use

Photo and specs of the Wyred4Sound multi-channel amp I will use

This room is also my living room. So before you start to think of all these big ugly speakers killing the room aesthetics, all of the speakers will be ingeniously hidden and stored away when not in use. This system will be used for home theater only, my two channel system will remain separate.

I will be using a Marantz AV 7005 as my processor.

I would like your feedback and opinions on this system regarding the bass output capability while not using a subwoofer.