Room Speaker Placement SQ Results

[RamDawg]

Please provide room speaker placement SQ results with system info. Thank you!!!

[shtf]

 

System info should have nothing whatsoever to do directly with speaker placement and the SQ achieved.  So I'd suggest leaving system info completely out of what I perceive is already a complex equation.  An equation to which I'm not aware that anybody can sufficiently answer, though try they might.

 

I postulate:

 

1.  For every speaker / room combination, there exists an optimal speaker placement location where sound quality will be potentially significantly superior than other placement locatons in the room.

 

2.  Others may claim hard and fast rules for speaker placement but there is no hard and fast rule since every room is different as is every speaker.

 

3.  There are general starting point rules but that's all they are.  For me, and depending on room size, I usually will start with the speaker front baffles being at least 5.5ft out from the front wall and about 2.5 ft. from the side walls dead center to the woofer.  Something like this works well enough for me as a starting point in smaller and mid-sized rooms.

 

4.  There are several primary characteristics to focus on regarding speaker placement e.g. focus, imaging, bass, etc.  But I find that if I only focus on bass then I've greatly simplified the difficulty of finding a more optimal locaton.  And if I can dial in the bass region, I mean really dial in the bass region by speaker placement, the rewards are tremendous and the other sought after charactistics will fall into place well enough so as not to be a distraction.

 

5.  That locating an optimal speaker placement, much less THE optimal speaker placement location takes time and patience.  Or luck of the draw.  In one new room it took me over 9 months of moving the speakers a few times each week a 1/2" here or there before I found an optimal location.  But boy was it worth it as I was finally able to achieve the tightet, deepest, most well-defined musical bass I've ever experienced from any playback system I've heard.  But now in a different and more difficult room and now with 240 lbs. speakers, I've chosen to be satisfied with sufficient bass response rather than outstanding bass response.  It's disappointing but it's a frustrating project I'm not willing to take on right now and the bass I'm able to achieve is still quite musical and better than most I've heard.

 

6.  Although there may be an ideal or the ideal speaker placement location for your speaker / room combo, that doesn't mean you'll ever find it.    At the very least hopefully you can find a more optimal-enough location to minimize any boomy / wooly bass and bass humps.

 

Anyway, that's my limited experience and opinion.

 

 

 

 

[mevdinc]

I had posted the following under Headphones & Speakers but posting here again, maybe useful for some.
--
Hi All,

A quick experiment with my speaker placement:
 

My room is around 40 square meters and rectangular shaped. I have my big active  ATCs along the long wall which allows me to keep them well away from the side walls (around 2.5M).
Short wall is about 5M and I have my speakers 1.4M from the front wall.
I'm sitting quite close to the back wall (60cm).

My listening position is just under 3M from the speakers, and they are just over 3M apart.
So, I'm quite close to my speakers, almost midfield listening position (like a big studio).

Because ATCs can play very clean and also loud (I like it loud!) I'm able to listen to music for hours on end, just like the many mastering engineers in many studios around the World.

Yesterday I decided to get even closer to the speakers but leaving them apart as before.
But with a more steep toe-in as can be seen from the attached pic.
I can appreciate the magic dome even more now, I get goosebumps allover especially with well recorded voices; I've been listening to Folk Singer album by Muddy Waters, just amazing!
It's like listening to a giant pair fantastic headphones!  ?

I thought I'd share it with you so you can experiment too. Especially in rooms with no or little room treatment, with a much closer listening positioning and steeper toe-in you may get better results.
It's worth a try and completely free, I believe speaker placement is very important

Best wishes.
Mev

[Quadman]

Every room is different and different speakers need different set up.  You can have a all drywall room, or wood paneling room or a huge open area with boundaries far enough apart they don't interfere with sound, high ceilings or low ceilings all have an effect on speakers and placement, etc. etc.  Dipole speakers have a figure 8 output pattern and can in theory be placed closer to side walls with little effect, horns and normal front firing speakers all have their own characteristics as well.

 

My mentor taught me long ago to get the science right then final adjust with your ears so for the last 20+ years I have owned some type of a spectrum analyzer device, currently using Clio 8.53.  Then with a series of test tones or pink noise you can see the response of your room/speaker on a screen.  My goal is to find the flattest response possible within the audio band at both 1M and at LP.  From there I then make tiny adjusts until my ear is pleased, then for giggles I remeasure to make sure my ear did not lead me to far astray.  Much faster and more accurate then using the ear alone.  My mentor also designed speakers which I will never part with and with those the bass runs off a separate amp and we use a parametric equalizer (bass only) where can can make some small adjustments to the bass response in room to get the flattest or sound we prefer the most.

 

Then there is room treatment, programs like clio let me measure reverb time in room and with that I can add treatment to either reduce reverb or increase reverb.  But this category of treatment is to large to just generalize like this.

 

To the poster above after many years of mostly adhering to the isosceles triangle rule, where I sat at the top of the triangle I find I now prefer to sit just inside the top of the triangle, ex. if speakers are 9 ft apart, before I sat 9 ft from each driver now I prefer 8-8.5Ft from each driver.