Five feet from the front wall

OMG, does no one on here actually read the OP’s question? I have long wondered the same thing; When a reviewer says they placed the speakers 2 feet from the wall, are they talking front or back of the speakers? Almost no one on here seems to actually know the answer to this question.

These threads start out about the OP but then the OP becomes non-relevant IMO.

Reviewers typically reference the back or side wall of the speaker when communicating distance....speaker designers normally mean the acoustic center of the driver for a measurement.

One challenge with going out 5 feet is that you are pushing down the frequency at which SBIR occurs in a box speaker. A SBIR dip at 50hz would take massive bass "traps" to bring up the dip...or multiple subs calibrated with DSP timings. 

If the speaker is 2 feet from the front wall, the SBIR dip may be around 100hz, which can be treated with bass traps behind the speakers...a 5 inch thick trap from GIK with a 5 inch air gap will give you almost 10 inches of depth, which should do well from around 90hz and up.

it's easy to over damp a room for hi-fi..we generally like the reverb of our rooms...but control rooms don't want the room involved...they of course aren't listening for enjoyment. 

So this is the challenge...the panel sellers don't really understand hi-fi goals so they will tell you to kill your sidewall first reflections and also to put a cloud on your ceiling to kill that first ceiling reflection...all those spatial cues we love they correctly see as colorations.

Floyd Toole discovered during the Harmon studies that people generally don't like the first reflection absorbed for music...but the dogma to kill first reflection points persists and is repeated in every corner on the internet. ;-)