2. speakers
  3. 137636-16074

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 2 responses by geoffkait

geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
I’d opine there’s a whole lot more to soundstage height than speaker placement and sitting height. There’s also vibration isolation of the source and the speakers, room acoustics (duh!) and the myriad other things audiophiles do to improve SQ. All dimensions need to come along together, not just height. Think of it as an expanding three dimensional sphere. Or four dimensions, if you prefer. In fact, there’s not enough time left to do everything you would like to an *educated* consumer. 😥

”No matter how much you have in the end you would have had even more if you started out with more.” - old audiophile axiom

The higher you fly
The deeper you go
The deeper you go
The higher you fly

Your inside is out
Your outside is in
Your outside is in
Your inside is out
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
We’ve been all over this before. There are many reasons people don’t get the soundstage height or any other dimension the way the big boys do. For starters, the speakers are almost always too far apart. One big reason is everything’s all messed up is the speakers are too far apart and the middle is MIA. To compensate, people toe the speakers in, making things even worse. You have to start with the speakers close together and slowly move them apart until the sounstage suddenly appears, like a bolt out of the blue⚡️. The height specifically isn’t there because of two things mostly, acoustic anomalies and not enough vibration isolation.

Trial and error without a methodology is like trying to solve some simultaneous equations in too many unknowns.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.
More to discover