Speaker Position Calculator- Pull 'em Away from the Wall!!!

Below shows the calculated frequency response curve duplicating the positions in my listening room based on position from wall, listening angle, listening position from wall, etc.
I had them positioned 3 feet from the wall (distance from the wall to the front of the speaker) but have since moved them out based on the calculations shown below.

The curves below show the response at 3' , 4' and 5' from the wall to the front of the speaker.

Look at the dramatic difference in the 5 feet position! It really sounds so much better too- fills in the holes in the bass and loses the muddy peak in the upper midbass. It really is such a dramatic difference.

The calculator is available here- can also be used for subwoofer placement too. See the "wall bounce SBIR calculator" link.

Speaker Placement 101: Is Speaker-Boundary Interference Killing Your Bass?

 

Or put them close to the wall. A speaker may or may not be constructed with the listening room in mind.

 

I think everybody knows their speakers should probably be further from the walls. Curse the limitations of living in an actual people-house!

 

Or even in the wall. No SBIR problems with in-walls. A lot of different ways to skin this cat.

But yeah, paying attention to SBIR -- and not just speaker boundary interference response but also listener-boundary response -- is going to have a huge impact on the frequency response of what we here. Get your speakers into positions where the problems are up in frequency ranges where treatment is easy helps too.

I will say, while calculators are great for roughing things it, I wouldn't advise relying on them vs. measuring your room. Rooms are rarely symmetrical, they have different mixes of absorptive and reflecting surfaces, and the room measurements don't always line up perfectly with ones expectations based on calculations.

 

I actively shopped out speakers that could be placed very very close to a wall and still sound phenomenal.
For some inexplicable reason, that whole living space thing really matters to everyone else in the family. I don't get it.
If living space were no object, I would have purchased DeVore O/96's. They don't do so well placed 8 inches from the front wall and side walls.

 

Yeah, I get mad at the reviews for the O's. Invariable written by apartment-dwellers who are able to put them 5-6' from the back and side walls. Jerks.

 

I used the calculator as a good starting point and adJust from there. It does not consider the floor and ceiling, back wall, ceiling slope, odd shape room, openings, etc.

 

putting the speakers close to the wall results in odd bass peaks and cancellations too- all else being equal.

the amazing thing is that at 3 feet from the wall, probably a very popular position- so much bass is cancelled we're being robbed!

 

It looks like your speakers are now about 4' from you. Hopefully you don't have any issues in hearing the crossover point between woofer and tweeter and also between the woofers and the ports. I currently have my speakers about 7' away and I had to stuff the front ports.

 

A friend has two Linn Exakt based systems which use room node calculations. He was never totally happy with the sound and tried adjusting manually, mostly by guesswork.

When I next visited, he asked me to bring measurement software and my Earthworks mic so we could compare with actual data. The Linn software was reasonably accurate but after measurement there were several bass nodes with an error of +/- 20 hz and Qs which were too narrow. One significant node was missing altogether.

We adjusted to the actual measured data and he is much happier, it did make a noticeable difference to the tightness and speed of bass response.

Calculations put things on the right track.... measurement removes any room for error.

 

I put my bluetooth speaker anywhere....

My iPhone built in speaker sounds best closer to a wall.

 

The thing is, all you're really doing when you're move the speakers (and listening position) around in the a typical home-sized room, is changing the frequencies at which the peaks and nulls related to fractional wave length reflections are centered.

So at 3-ft you might have a 1/4 wavelength null at 94 Hz; at 5 feet, you'll have it at 56 Hz. But at 1-ft it's gonna be at 285 Hz or so, a much easier frequency to treat (this is why sometimes a sub/sat set up can be easier to place than a full range speaker, you can place the full rangers at one distance from boundaries at which cancellations are below the range at which they're operating; and you can place the sub at distances where the cancellations are above the range at which they're operating). If you get out to 8 feet (or you're sitting at an 8-foot distance from a boundary), you might have harder problems -- with a 35 Hz null and a 70 Hz peak. So, there can be a spot at which speakers or listener are far enough out into a room that there are problems at low frequencies that are hard to treat, and a spot where they're close enough that LF SBIR isn't the problem.

Then it gets complicated because you have six surfaces -- floors, ceilings, and 4 walls -- all at different distances, and maybe the angle of reflection is not square because of furnishings or toe-in or whatever, so you have multiple complex reflections; and you have room mode related cancellations and reinforcements in addition to SBIR and listener boundary interference related ones, and listener-boundary distances matter too.

That's why it's hard to set a firm rule, or to rely too heavily on the model and not measurements. I know when I measured my room I wound up with speakers and listening position in a fairly different spot than I expected from the models that managed to smooth out a big null in the 250 Hz range which I wouldn't have expected from the models.

 

Klipsch Cornwall's are an example of speakers designed to be in corners and against walls(Corn-Wall). They sound great there. The cool thing is that you can move them out into the room a bit and they still sound good. Bass sounds about the same to me(although there are debates among some of the cognoscenti about what's better). I love them because they are about the least fussiest speaker I have ever had and the fact that they can(should?) be pushed out of the room to sound optimum makes the wife kinda happy too. Winning!

 

Where are these genuinely large apartments?

 

Parts of NYC I've never been to, apparently.

 

I've had the best luck starting with the Vandersteen method and adjusting from there. Rake angle can also have a significant impact on the bass, even as little as 1 degree.

 

Just curious about this woofer/port issue? I have my speakers in living room system about 8' from my ears and about 28" from the wall. They are rear vented with a long 3"x14" slot.
Does a rear ported/vented speaker act differently that a front port/vent? Also does a vent differ from a round port?
For decades I was a sealed box diehard, but my last decade or so of having tubes has meant I have settled for bass-reflex designs for efficiency sake. I am still trying to learn and tweak.

 

Absolutely, and strictly 1% territory too. Those apartments are larger than my last house (which was big) and larger than my current apartment (also large enough) in my own building in downtown Toronto. For the rest of the unwashed masses, speaker placement is careful process in our apartments and condos.

 

Yeah. My favorite dealer in San Francisco sells mostly DeVore and Harbeth. Orangutans and San Francisco should be an impossible combination, but he says its his best selling speaker. I don't think I've been able to put a speaker further then 2' from the wall in my entire life, somehow I haven't given up on music.

 

I get the optimal notated on-a-graph perfection stuff. Good stuff to know and this is the perfect forum to learn more about this. But i personally decided decades ago that my listening Area needs to be in the room I most enjoy actually living and entertaining in.

I play so much music I don’t want to have an annex unless it’s the place I really live in.

The front of my speakers are about two feet from the back wall.

 

Well said, for sure. In my experience, the very best listening rooms (my own and others) are the ones that are broken up with several bookcases of different sizes (full of books and music), a combination of upholstered and non-upholstered furniture, a few, low scattered tables, table lamps with shades, framed artwork and/or posters of different sizes hanging on the walls. Most of time, the pesky room nodes and standing waves that would be horrible when the rooms are relatively empty (i.e., when set up as exclusive “listening” or “A/V” rooms) don’t stand a chance. Full rooms - that is, rooms full of our lives and interests and collections and things - are also almost always great sounding rooms too, in my experience.

 

What about front-ported speakers?

 

Regarding front port and back port, I am no expert. What I read is back port is not as easy to place near wall boundaries vs front port.

 

IME, they can work well when positioned somewhat closer to the wall behind them. Still need some distance from side walls though.

Then again, adjacent, loaded bookshelves positioned to the sides tend to break up the bad stuff and leave the good stuff to hear.

 

Yeah. I used to have funky looking diffusers on the wall, they didn't really scream "spend time in this room", so I replaced them with mirrors that bring more sunlight into the room. Kind of the opposite of an acoustic treatment, but definitely made the room better.