Equilateral position for speakers?

An equilateral position for speakers and listener is often recommended, at least as a starting point. How many here use that, and if not, what is your preferred setup?

I usually find the equilateral position gives too up-front a perspective for my taste, and have moved the listening seat back by another 25% to 50% of the equilateral distance.

---

Background: In an emergency, I had to remove my equipment from the room, without time to measure positions. Now, I'm back in and haven't yet got the good sound I had before. Some of that is the new flooring, I think (carpet instead of cork floor with area rugs), but I think some is positioning. I'm working on it today and looking for fresh insights.

 

I go for the equilateral positioning. I even used a tape measure to get it exact. Works for me...

 

Mine are about 2/3's apart from my seating position. They are Focals and not all that picky.

 

Equilateral is considered a "nearfield" setup and is the best for anything considered to be a "monitor" type of speaker (British or otherwise) and works great for me.
Depending on room dimensions it lets you spread them out fairly well but also lets you pull them away from the wall- at least two feet- and up to four feet or so gives an incredibly deep soundstage that lets the "players" take the stage behind the speakers in different positions left, right, front, back and even beyond the boundaries of the sides of the speakers. it was a little spooky the first time I heard a deep stage setup like that but has since become a favorite way to setup a room.

 

Mine are well out away from the walls. (3ft from wall behind them and 4ft from the side walls with a 21/2" toe in.) They sound fantastic. The listening chair is equidistant from each speaker.

 

My current speakers are remarkably unfussy about placement. I plunked them down about eight feet apart and about a foot and a half from the wall and toed them in about an inch. My main listening chairs are slightly off center and about twelve feet away. They sound good to me and tinkering with the placement does not seem to make noticeable differences except for distance from wall allowing me to dial the bass up or down. Also as they had more hours on them the bass seemed a tad stronger so I adjusted the distance accordingly, very subtly. A tape measure never entered into my obviously unsophisticated thought process! They are BTW Tekton Pendragons.

 

This is what B&W recommends for their speakers. I think it works best with speakers having a wide dispersion of sound.

 

The distance apart is 2/3 the distance from the center to my head.

 

In most setups, equilateral has the speakers a bit to wide apart such that the center image is not as "solid" as would be the case with speakers a little bit closer together. There is nothing like trying different positions to get things right. Ignore any rigid rules (except this one) on setup.

 

I went equilateral for a long time and then took a suggestion to go somewhere around .85 distance between speakers compared to distance to head. I'm liking it. Often equilateral can give you too wide a dispersion among instruments. The iscoseles triangle helps this. You lose some immersion but you are more an observer in this scenario, which is probably more realistic.

 

I placed my speakers as close to the ideal layout according to Dynaudio (an equilateral triangle) as the room allowed for. Sadly, that wasn't very close to ideal. They still sound pretty great at six feet in between them. A 3/4" toe-in and a listening position 8 feet from both speakers. They sit a little over a foot from the wall. The equilateral part doesn't make as big a difference in the sound to me as their distance from wall behind them. I really wish I could get them another foot forward.

 

I usually end up with an equilateral (or nearly equilateral) triangle for speaker placement. The last time around I followed the Cardas room setup recommendations (again, equilateral), and have been quite happy with the results.

Cardas said the same thing, that equilateral is a nearfield setup. I've never been able to find a definition of what nearfield is, or requires, or means. For example, my outdoor system has the speakers 60ft apart, and I sit 60ft from each speaker making an equilateral triangle. 60ft seems a bit large to be called nearfield listening, but if being an equilateral triangle defines nearfield, I guess I am in the nearfield outside.

 

Thanks to all for the replies. I look forward to reading a few more. BTW, a few things:

1. I tried the Cardas golden-ratio setup, and in my oddball room (low and relatively narrow and not lossy), it was terrible.

2. I spent the afternoon moving things around -- but only a little -- and adjusting the bass EQ. Now I'm getting some of the best sound I've had in a long time. It's funny how small adjustments can make a big difference. I wound up with the speakers about 86" apart and about 118" from my ears to either speaker. That's similar to what several of you are doing.

3. The speakers are almost 4' from the back wall and about 3' from the side walls.

 

the standard in studio is equilateral triangle but imo for listening pleasure, speaker a bit wider is preffered

its worth trying joachim Gerard whom actually recommend speaker more apart then away from listening position and a ratio of 2.85/2!
I opened a thread about Joachim method:
Joachim Gerhard speaker placement! WOW and I need more info - diyAudio

bob katz, rod gervais recommend around equilateral triangle

 

OP, dont you have a measurement mic?
first, you need to know your room modes before anything else and the only way to know if your speakers are well positioned is by taking measurements at the listneing position
anything else is very useless if you dont understand where NOT to put your speakers in your room

[Q

 

Me too. I can't seat any closer than one and a half times the distance between my floorstanders. The equilateral approach never worked for me.

 

which can be managed with some toe in, which is actually quite good for imaging and tonality. mine are aimed so that the axis of the speaker fires to the outside of each respective ear by about 8 inches. imaging is dead on solid and the soundstage is spacious.

 

Toe in controls imaging, brightness and wall reflections. It varies by speaker and room. It can be anything from a little to a lot. If the manufacturer has recommendations, start there.

 

exact
experiment with your speaker in your system.
a good strating point is equilateral and go from there. some speaker with very excellent phase response and good imaging will sound right with many different speaker position and ime theres trade off for every position. pick your poison, but theres no size fits for all.


fascinate me how some seem to be able to say sweeping generalisations like:
speaker too wide apart have weak phantom center. this is pure BS

 

Yes, I do use a measurement mic; that's how I chose the basic setup. Unfortunately, I'm sitting in the center of the room both laterally (by which I mean on the centerline running front to back) and vertically (because the ceiling is 7 ft tall and seated, my ears are about half that), so it's difficult to avoid nodes in most seating positions. The worst now is a narrow null around 45 Hz, which I can avoid either by sitting at the very back of the room (not useful, because the door is there, among other things), or by sitting too close to the speakers for my taste. Positioning a pair of subs about halfway down the side walls has helped considerably, and EQing the bass helps, too.

As you said, there are trade-offs to every set of positions (speakers, subs, and listener). And as @Larry I and you said, there are no hard and fast ruless. Every room and every model of speakers is different. I find that measurements do help, especially paired with EQ.

 

I pretty much never have had an equilateral set up. Always been something closer to the space between the speakers being circa 2/3 of the distance from the speakers to the listening position. In my current room I wound up sitting even a little further back than that based on taking measurements of the room...speakers a little farther back toward the front wall and listening position a little farther back in the room removed a wide null centered at around 125 Hz. And the placement of the speakers relative the the sidewall I pretty much set up so that the lowest frequency where there might be a speaker boundary interference response problem that I can't treat easily is one I'm rolling off to the sub, so that partially defines the space apart. But I never really would set up equilateral, unless it was for some kind of really close monitoring for studio work.

 

Interesting that your results have been similar to mine.

Is this something that you can calculate? How?

 

Yeah, problem are going to be when reflections are at 1/4 wavelength intervals so if you know the lengths of the waves at various frequencies you can calculate the 1/4 wavelength points, but why calculate when you can use the nifty little applet available here: http://www.realtraps.com/sbirlbir

I will say though, in the end, after doing actual measurements with a calibrated mic and rta software I wound up with an even greater distance between myself and the speakers (and the speakers, as I say, farther back towards the wall behind them than they had originally been). I wouldn't have arrived at that set up just by ear, but there was clearly a problem with an upper bass null that I was able to flatten out by moving stuff that way. I know in audiophilia it's all the rage to say just believe your ears and trust your ears and dial everything in that way, but honestly, this was really better and I would never have gotten there by ears and conventional wisdom in terms of placement guidelines. Had to measure.

 

Certainly. Without measurement, we are like the blind men describing an elephant.

 

wow, SBIR talk here at stevehoffman
good job chevrokas

Mike, the null at 45hz is probably not listening position related, but speaker position related...

most of the time when it comes to best speaker position, im very much limited and so I place the R and L speaker at the best measuring spot. if it happens to be perfect equilateral or close to it, the better, but even if it makes the speaker slightly too wide or too close to each other in relation to the LP, thats just the way it is.

for very serious system like yours, thats the only thing you can do. add treatment if you havent.

yeah, and this is total ignorant BS myth that do a real disservice to everyone in this hobby.
agree with you 100%