Hi all,
Just thinking about speaker placement in my room…. Did some REW measurements and found all sorts of peaks and troughs when measured at my listening spot which I understand is quite normal. Before I start moving speakers I thought I’d get the thoughts of the learned team.
I set my listening chair 38% from the back wall as 38% from the front wall would never work, the speakers are around 800mm from the front wall and spaced to form an equilateral triangle. This was based on what an ideal room should look like (from my reading that is).
Is it worth moving the speakers to try and get a better (Flatter) response? If I move things around I get away from the rules. The room is 4.5mts x 5.7mtrs so not a big room by any means. I found once I eq’d a couple of the low freq peaks down a bit things sounded better, as can be expected bumping up the troughs didn’t do much.
Or……. As it sound really nice leave it and enjoy?
Just thinking about speaker placement in my room…. Did some REW measurements and found all sorts of peaks and troughs when measured at my listening spot which I understand is quite normal. Before I start moving speakers I thought I’d get the thoughts of the learned team.
I set my listening chair 38% from the back wall as 38% from the front wall would never work, the speakers are around 800mm from the front wall and spaced to form an equilateral triangle. This was based on what an ideal room should look like (from my reading that is).
Is it worth moving the speakers to try and get a better (Flatter) response? If I move things around I get away from the rules. The room is 4.5mts x 5.7mtrs so not a big room by any means. I found once I eq’d a couple of the low freq peaks down a bit things sounded better, as can be expected bumping up the troughs didn’t do much.
Or……. As it sound really nice leave it and enjoy?
Agreed, patience is the best path here...
The "rules" are not hard and fast, they are at best "guidelines" and serve only as a starting point... more like a suggestion than anything else.
Remember, you are fitting your gear into your life, not the other way around. I've seen small rooms where the sweet spot is a couch on the back wall with the speakers only inches from the front wall. I've also seen rooms set up the wide way instead of the usual long way. ... you name it, it's been done and with patience almost any arrangement can be made to work.
For moving your speakers... keep in mind that the structure of your room imposes all kinds of screwyness on the sound. Move them an inch one way or the other and you can be sure the treble will change. Plus every room has Modes (sometimes called Nodes) where reflections and echos play terror with the sound. Once again a move of only a couple of inches can change that radically.
Also keep in mind that moving your listening position can make a huge difference too. Shuffling your comfy chair forward and back a few inches can change everything. It is also possible that because of uneven structures in a room, or uneven hearing, the sweet spot we all crave could be a few inches to the left or right of the centre of your speakers.
While evaluating and moving to find the best spot, you should not equalise. The DSP will hide problems that might help you find a better spot. The time to apply DSP or Equalization is once you've got the best spot and still have a problem to deal with.
But mostly keep in mind this one simple fact ... No setup is perfect.
You can get "really darned freaking good" but perfect just won't happen.
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Yes plus front wall.
Rear wall is double glazed sliding door with heavy acoustic curtains covering them.
95% of the time it sounds very, very good but whenever I stumble across a harsh sounding or over bassy recording the brain kicks in and starts thinking about how to fix it. Tone down the HF then other recordings sound dull....
I'm sure you all know what I mean!!
Thanks for your thoughts and yes patience is probably whats called for.
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Sound stage width is very good but I've never really experienced a lot of depth, no matter what configuration I've had. I've read people waffle on about "seeing the guitarist 6 feet behind the vocalist). But having said that with eyes closed (and right recording) I do loose all sense of room dimensions. Sometimes get a surprise when I do open my eyes and realise the walls are there.
Then ... in all due respect... you need to have a talk with your brain.
A bad recording is a bad recording. Plain and simple.
There is nothing you can or should do to your system because some flunky recording engineer messed up.
Really... put the blame where it belongs.
Then ... in all due respect... you need to have a talk with your brain.
Thats the problem, my brain..... I often have trouble switching it out of analyzer mode and back into enjoy the music mode.
I listen to a recording that’s very trebly and start thinking about cutting the HF, then I put on a flat recording that needs a lift in the HF and there you go – stuck in and endless loop!
So yes you're right, I do need to have a talk with the other dude upstairs, he needs to be put in his place....
A long time ago I realised that with rare exceptions, we are at the mercy of the mix.
It's all the recording, mixing and mastering engineers who just have to get their fingers into the sources we listen to and, frankly, with the state of modern music, most of them should probably be driving trains.
The simple truth is that what we get to listen to has very little, if any, actual resemblance to the original performance. In many cases there isn't even an original performance as the whole thing was done in studio, with musicians coming in separately to lay down their tracks. Increasingly there aren't even real instruments as many studios are now reduced to a sampling synthesizer and a drum machine.
Then the music is re-timed, equalised, compressed, quantised, autotuned, balanced and re-mixed as the engineers wish.
In the end what we get to listen to is not the original music at all ... it is what the various engineers want us to hear.
Realising this I took a policy of dealing only in longer averages on my setup. Instead of making up my mind about my equipment based on a single passage --or heaven forbid a single snippet-- I spend the time to get an "average" impression of my music collection in a given setup.
It seems that most of us have a mental impression of what "good" music should sound like and we tend to get a bit disappointed when everything we listen to doesn't measure up to this imaginary standard. But the truth is that Nothing ever will, because the sources we listen to are made by someone with a different mental image.
That perfect performance we seek from our gear just isn't going to happen.
(I'm sorry... but unless you have live recordings with no editing, it just won't.)
To take the sting out of all this, I made up a playlist of my favourite songs... the ones with really good mixes. When I'm judging a system I use only that playlist and I listen to all of the 30 or so pieces from different genres on it before deciding what to do... if anything.
The rest of the time I make a point of just sitting back with a nice cup of Orange Pekoe and letting the music wash away my cares of the day.
It really is good enough that your music reaches out and gets your attention. That you enjoy it ... All the rest is destined to disappoint you.
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Unwanted room resonances.
I have a room measuring about 4m x 4m x 3.2m which I use to play music in. I place my speakers, two of them, in the front corners facing the middle of the back wall. I am thinking about reducing room resonances and would like some hints. The room resonances are sometimes so strong that the room sounds more like a tuned low frequency wind pipe. I keep my speakers on stands at about half the room height.
I have a room measuring about 4m x 4m x 3.2m which I use to play music in. I place my speakers, two of them, in the front corners facing the middle of the back wall. I am thinking about reducing room resonances and would like some hints. The room resonances are sometimes so strong that the room sounds more like a tuned low frequency wind pipe. I keep my speakers on stands at about half the room height.
I would like to add a couple things to this speaker placement discussion that I have found to be more than extremely helpful in getting the best speaker placement in my room.
One is to have the speakers placed in the area of least interaction with the room boundaries, walls. A good introduction into this is to watch the Dave Wilson you tube video he made about the Wilson Audio Speaker Procedure. See here: YouTube The first part of the video is directed to this very point.
The other crucial aspect of speaker placement concerns equal speaker loading into the room from each speaker. My terminology might not be the best, but when this happens the speakers become as one and the sound becomes quite natural in all aspects. A good way to check for this is to use a mono recording and to have the sound stay exactly in the middle of the two speakers from most any listening point in the room.
This is done by setting one speaker as a reference and making small adjustments to the other speaker to get the equal room loading and stable sound image.
Some good references are the above mentioned Dave Wilson video, Bob Robbins, rationalspeakerplacement,com, a google search for Sumiko Speaker Placement, or Master Set. This is all good reading and viewing.
I have a thread on this forum which addresses some of what I mention: Speaker Positioning.
For the record, my room is 14' x 13' x 10'. I have set my speakers as described in my thread and it truly works.
I might add that setting the speakers is just the first step before you can really address any other room issues that might be bothering you.
One is to have the speakers placed in the area of least interaction with the room boundaries, walls. A good introduction into this is to watch the Dave Wilson you tube video he made about the Wilson Audio Speaker Procedure. See here: YouTube The first part of the video is directed to this very point.
The other crucial aspect of speaker placement concerns equal speaker loading into the room from each speaker. My terminology might not be the best, but when this happens the speakers become as one and the sound becomes quite natural in all aspects. A good way to check for this is to use a mono recording and to have the sound stay exactly in the middle of the two speakers from most any listening point in the room.
This is done by setting one speaker as a reference and making small adjustments to the other speaker to get the equal room loading and stable sound image.
Some good references are the above mentioned Dave Wilson video, Bob Robbins, rationalspeakerplacement,com, a google search for Sumiko Speaker Placement, or Master Set. This is all good reading and viewing.
I have a thread on this forum which addresses some of what I mention: Speaker Positioning.
For the record, my room is 14' x 13' x 10'. I have set my speakers as described in my thread and it truly works.
I might add that setting the speakers is just the first step before you can really address any other room issues that might be bothering you.
Agreed ... I was just looking at the OP's photo and my thought was to take everything in that room, except the tv stand, and move it about 1 meter closer to the back of the room.
General Rule #1 ... corners and speakers don't mix. The corner itself ends up acting like a megaphone and can seriously upset the sonic balance in the room.
So unless you are running Klipsh Horns (which are designed for corners) I would first consider moving them inward. Start at about the 1/3 and 2/3 positions on your front wall and tweak from there.
Also consider moving your listening position forward from the back wall a bit as well.
one should experiment a lot with speaker placement, getting experience is a good thing and will help in the future with new rooms and speakers
to me, it almost always sounds best with at least 1 meter to any wall
an almost perfect cube is not the best room shape, if it is made of concrete it is even worse, but try place the woofers not equaldistance to any boundary
to me, it almost always sounds best with at least 1 meter to any wall
an almost perfect cube is not the best room shape, if it is made of concrete it is even worse, but try place the woofers not equaldistance to any boundary
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