speaker placement in a tough room, please help.

I would recommend firing them from short to tall wall. The reason for this is 2 fold. One you will get a slight gain from going from a smaller area (volume), to a larger one. You effectively decreasing pressure through the room and will have the highest pressure behind the speakers. An added benefit to this is that by creating known pressure areas like this it is easy to acoustically treat them. The other reason I would fire to the high side, is that if you were firing to the low side you would get a reflection point off the ceiling behind you. It would be a long reflection time and would make the speakers less clear. You could treat the ceiling to get rid of the problem, but the easier solution is to just not work against nature and fire from short to long wall. Hope that helps.

I re-read your post and may have misunderstood the slope to your room. Is it centered about the room--so sloping in one direction from one side to the other? If it's a continuous sloping then I did read it correctly the first time, but if not my answer needs serious revision--please clarify.

I would point them firing toward the peak. This minimizes early reflections from the ceiling. I had a layout like this once and the image height was fantastic.

Thanks Rives,the room has a continuous slope from low to high. The room will be used as a dedicated room, I'm a little worried about how small it is, but these days in S.Cal the price of the room makes the equipment price seem almost inconsequential.

Dave: Then I stick with my first response. This is an area that none of the software programs address. You can model things in both areas, but you will likely not get very different results other than some minor modifications in the RT-60 response curve (Reverberation times for 60 db attenuation). Software programs do not address the psycho acoustical nature of what occurs. We're considering do some significant research and development in this area, but it's very expensive.