The Importance Of Speaker Location

[David Meek]

Yesterday was an interesting day - I actually had an hour or so with nothing going on, so I was listening to some music in my room and decided to play with my speaker positioning to try and improve the soundstage. It was good from the edge of the left Aeriel across to the edge of the right, but there wasn't much of anything going on outside them. The first thing I did was move them out from the front wall about an inch, and then I took off about half of the toe-in. I sat back and called up track 13 - Brown Eyes - from Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album. . . WOW! Those small changes made a world of difference. I had a solid soundstage that extended out to the side walls of the room without losing any of the solidity already present between the speakers. Now, THIS is what I'd been wanting to hear. A little more critical listening showed that there was a bit of a left bias to the sound (slightly weaker to the right) so I moved the right Aerial out another inch from the back wall. A little more listening showed that this leveled things out nicely. Got the masking tape out and put silhouettes on the carpet so I could get back to those positions and then kept moving and listening. It turned out that I'd found the "best" spots there at the beginning, but I wanted to be sure.

As it turned out, simple, tiny movements of 1 inch for one speaker and 2 inches for the other, and then playing with the toe-in made a major (to me at least) difference. Playing with speaker positioning can be a pain depending on your speaker - my Aerial 7Bs, with the spiked isolation stands weigh 115 lbs each. But, the results can be well worth it as yesterday brought home to me.

[brucek]

David, Yeah, I can sympathize with you. Doing soundstage placement with large heavy speakers on spikes is tricky. I certainly don't believe there's any hard and fast rules about placement or toe-in either.

I remember reading about what great soundstage my ProAc 3.8's were supposed to have, so when I got them a few years ago I placed them a few feet out from the corners and toed them in to create a point behind my head (standard starting position).

Well, it created a perfect sound spot between the two speakers where all sound emanated from. If I sat you down and asked which speakers the sound came from you would not have hesitated to say only the center channel speaker was turned on (which it wasn't) and that the two mains were shut off. Not really what I was looking for......

So, I did more testing while moving the mains with less and less toe in. You could aurally 'see' the soundstage stretching out between the two mains as I toed them out until it was wider than the mains themselves. That's the spot I was looking for....

I think every room is different and you have to experiment until you get the desired effect. No rules here.... :T