speaker placement - is it really important? and why away from walls?

The reason is that loudspeakers can sound better away from walls - less than optimum sound is obtained from an in-wall mounting. By that I don't mean that the loudspeaker itself is bad, rather it's the nature of our psycho-acoustic hearing process that makes a loudspeaker that is moved out into the room by 3 feet or more sound better.

This is true, and there are empirical reasons why it is true. And it has to do with psychoacoustics; not what our ears hear, but what our brains perceive.

An important feature of our hearing is the ability to locate the sources of sound. To do this, our brain analyzes the perceived time delay of echos. (There are other factors too.) We know that whales use echolocation to explore and navigate their environment. Humans have echolocation skills too; they are different than a whale's skills because they evolved for different environments and purposes. But a blind person learns echolocation skills fast. You can tell how far from a wall you are, how big a room is, whether the floor is carpeted or not, etc. We all respond to acoustical cues about our environment but we're not always aware of it. When we walk into a big gymnasium, or a concert hall or well designed church, we are aware of the extraordinary acoustical properties of that space. But most of the time, we are not aware at a conscious level.

Now back to speaker placement. When we're listening to live music, the musicians are never against the wall. There is always space between them and the wall, whether it's in a concert hall, church, or even our living room. And we perceive that acoustically whether we know it or not. By the same token, we unconsciously perceive the reflections from a loudspeaker in our room. We know that there's a "sweet spot" for our speakers. We know that if we place them haphazardly that we can lose a lot of the perceived detail. This is one of the reasons why.

Psychoacoustics is steeped in a lot of woo to be sure. But make no mistake; there is science behind it.
 
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Eddie, I disagree. The amount that nearby walls affect imaging depends on the amount of control the speakers have over reflections from those walls. Speakers placed near walls should be designed for the purpose. When they are, the walls may as well not even be there.
 
Is speaker placement important..................it's everything. Where speakers sit in the room and in relation to each other is what makes good sound. It's also a bit of hard work to get the very best obtainable sound.

Wall effects..................You want the speakers to interact with walls as little as possible. There's some good general information from the late Dave Wilson in this video: Nymeria, especially where the guy walks out into the room listening for his voice to change. I was sceptical until I tried this, then did it twice more just to be sure, and it worked exactly as described. This gives a minimum distance out into the room. Maximum distance will vary with a lot of factors.

Then there are reflections. Long wall placement and near field listening does tend to minimize reflection issues.

Early in this old thread there was a connection to the Cardas method and drawing. This is quite popular. However for this to work properly the listening room has to be exactly the same as that in the drawing: perfect symmetry in all aspects of the room.

Overall objective is to get the two speakers to act together as a single sound source. A good way to test this is to use a mono recording and have the sound stay perfectly centered between the speakers from any place in the room. Well, that's my view anyway.
 
DISTRIBUTED MODE LOUDSPEAKERS.

We all know that the room in which a speaker is placed has a great deal to do with how the speaker sounds. We have been told that our rooms need to be specially treated to achieve the best sound. We have also been well schooled to know that speaker placement within a given room is very critical. For the most part, all of that is true.


I spoke at length to designer Dr. Shelly Katz at a recent audio show where he explained everything I have recounted above and much more. He described how conventional speakers sound their best when they interact with the room as little as possible. Most speakers are designed and tested in anechoic chambers – an environment completely inverse to a real world room and therefore we have to move them around until they have as little interaction with our rooms as possible. “The Podiums are completely the opposite. They are designed to have as much room interaction as possible.” He told me to move the speakers around until they sound best (something that is very easy to do since they are so light).

We have also been told that our speakers need to be precisely aligned in order to hear them at their best, or to hear a stereo image at all. “That’s not the case with the Podiums”, he smiled. I was seated in a standard sized room at the Rocky Mountain AudioFest with music playing on the slim panels that were in a standard stereo configuration facing me. “Close your eyes for minute”, Katz told me. After I obliged, I heard the sound change a little, mostly a phase shift momentarily, but then the stereo image snapped back into focus. “Open your eyes”, he said. Shelly had moved the panels. One had been turned so that it angled to the left, the other angled to the right in a completely random position. With normal speakers, I would not be hearing any stereo image at all. I was amazed.

If you own electrostatic panels, you know that their worst quality is a very narrow sweet spot. Move your head a few inches in either direction and all you hear is the left or right channel depending on which way you moved. Obviously, that is not the case with these speakers. Curiouser and curiouser.