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Listening Height Adjustment -- Is This Why Two People Don't Hear the Same?

Just wanted to pass on a recent experience, and surprise, in my system

My room (https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/5707) is set up for one person to listen. I have a medium height arm chair at the listening position and had always assumed that it left me with my ears broadly in line with the tweeters in my Magicos (i.e. 42-43" off the ground)

Well I checked and I was actually at 38-40" depending on how upright I sit. Wondering how much of a difference getting it just so would make I purchased a set of add on feet, each 3.5-4" tall and added them to my chair -- not a good look!

But wow, what an improvement in sound. Tonally the speakers take on a very different balance, upper mid range and vocal intelligibility is substantially improved, bass is lighter but better defined and overall integration across the frequency range is much much better than before

The odd thing is that I don’t have the tweeters pointed directly at me -- they’re angled about 2’ off to either side, so what would a couple of inches in the vertical make such a difference assuming the tweeter drop off is uniform in all directions? Is it more a matter of driver integration?

This experience leads me to wonder
a) how many of us have actually measured and adjusted our set height to optimal/tweeter level, and do we do this every time we audition a new speaker, and
b) if two individuals are not the same height do we adjust for the difference in height between them sitting -- say a 5’6 vs 6’ person that’s probably a 3" difference sitting -- unless your chair has adjustable feet the experience of the two individuals may be completely different
128x128folkfreak

Showing 12 responses by folkfreak

folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
Agreed tweeter at ear height may not be how thespeaker was designed. It is for Magicos but my point is more about how accurately we make the listening height adjustment for each listener and chair

There is also a separate point about making sure that each speaker is perfectly aligned relative to each other and the listener, both angle and tilt. Here I find differences of a mm or less at the speaker are significant, like you I have a system of lasers and levels to enable this. 
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
@erik_squires surely tilting causes all sorts of other issues however by changing the relationship of the mid range and bass drivers to the floor -- it also doesn't help if you have more than one listener and need to adjust quickly between the two
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
Nope with Magico Q3s the vertical sweet spot is +/- 1" or less, sucks but that's what it is. The horizontal sweet spot in my room is maybe 1-2" at most. Like I say in my room description it's a big pair of headphones
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
Quick add is that the third dimensional ie towards the speakers is not sensitive, in fact it acts more like a depth of image function, move towards the speaker and the parts of the mix that are forward come towards you (while everything else stays in place) , move back and the reverse. It’s a kind of uncanny effect but presumably a result of controlling the room well
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
Well this seems to have wondered off into a discussion about speaker placement in the room in general which is fine ...

The only point I was trying to make was to observe that, in my room, with my speakers, even when they are optimally positioned the listener themselves must also be located to within +/- 1-2" in the vertical and lateral dimensions, with the ability to adjust front-back to taste

My room is basically set up as a near field system, truly a large set of headphones. It's not big enough to even have a second chair so allowing for more than one listener was never even part of the design. I will in future however try to ensure that if I have visitors I make sure their ears get to the perfect level!
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
Ah but Mr @schubert if they had 10-20 times that invested in the system then you'd definitely sit up and pay attention!
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
You have a good point @prof, hence it's important to a) be aware of these differences and know when you're experiencing them and b) have a setup that allows you the listener to get to a consistent and repeatable position. 

Hence probably a fairly firm chair, reliably located and so on.

One of the ones that always gets me is glasses on vs glasses off, this is both some sort of acoustic interference effect and also the removal of a layer of visual processing allowing more focus on the sound
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
Many people have talked about using tilt to align the tweeters with the listener. Leaving aside room interaction my concern with this method is how do you ensure each speaker is tilted the same amount?

I make sure that each of my speakers is perfectly level to within a fraction of a degree (I use a very accurate, very heavy spirit level). Just as with laser aligning for toe in having completely equal level is essential to tip top information retrieval

if you are adjusting tilt on each speaker how can you be certain they are the same? Especially if your floor is not absolutely even. Maybe you level each speaker and then adjust tilt, but that assumes you have a vernier system or the like to ensure absolute consistency on each speaker
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
@genez nice super near field setup, very neat and precise

I solved my problems by screwing some 4” risers into the legs of my listening chair, leaves my feet swinging like a child but sounds so much better!
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
@pimbo you are more than welcome to come and listen to my system and you may be rather surprised that while it may break some commonly accepted “rules” of setup it does sound surprisingly good 😉

The post by @bdp24 in my system description is helpful in this regard, posting having heard the system in action

You might also want to consider how you come across in your first post in response to a well established member ... its more than a little arrogant of you to suggest I’m a newbie neophyte when it comes to setup. There’s absolutely nothing in “Get Better Sound” I haven’t tried, tested and rejected or adopted based on how it works in my room. If you’d bothered to read the thread and my full system description you would understand how meticulously I have done this, to make the system work in my room, for me. I’ve also benefited from the advice of Art Noxon in the core setup arrangement. It’s always amazing how people can diagnose acoustics based on pictures and specs, I wish I had that ability!

Oh and by the way using shims under Magico Q3s on Townshend Podia will actually cause them to fall over! Don’t try this at home!
folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
Also you said

one of the most important things for great sound quality (speaker placement) wasn’t optimal in the first place.

The whole point of this thread is that the height of each listener’s ears needs to be optimized to the position of the speakers, and that differences in listener torso dimensions need to be taken into account.

My entire premise was that you’d optimized speaker placement in all other regards already, and my surprise was that a small change in this one dimension (vertical) had such effect, whereas front back was very different. Your paraphrase is a gross misrepresentation, or maybe I’m just a terrible communicator 🤔

And also one one thing you cannot tell from pictures is that the wall behind my head is both built from scratch as a semi absorbent surface and bass trap and then further treated with ASC and SR products, I’m more than aware of the impact of close in reflections, see my discussion of the use of GOBOs to treat reflections from the equipment alongside me. Like I said in my first post, this is not new to me and I’m fully aware of how to treat a room



folkfreak's avatar
folkfreak OP
1,349 posts
 
@pimbo thanks for your nice follow up message. As you saw from the thread I had to make some compromises to work within the rather odd shaped, and smaller than ideal, room that I have to work with. The decision to go with a long wall set up rather than the more common short wall arrangement was made by Art Noxon when we started the design and so the whole room, including the in wall acoustic treatment, was designed with this placement in mind. Its actually a version of the classic Cardas setup.

@fleschler and @johnk -- given the room cannot accommodate more than one listener at anything close to the sweet spot the idea of designing for wide dispersion is moot. However it has been my experience that any speaker I've ever liked really only worked best for a listener at one point. It may sound "nice" off axis but you are not hearing the best the speaker can deliver unless alignment is achieved to mm (not inch) or so tolerances. Hence the time and effort Jim Smith and other setup gurus spend with laser alignment tools to get the setup just so. Ron Heydrich from Marigo, just across the river in WA from me, took me through this process and showed me how to get perfect alignment between each speaker (this is actually why you can see pieces of blue painters tape in the room behind the speaker position as these are the reference points for speaker toe in). 

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