Perfect Speaker Placement - Put next to the back wall as much as possible.

Amazing, math and physics work! Thank you for the post @baylinor.  If you do measurements, you will likely find that is where the frequency response is flattest.

However I find that the 38% rule from the back wall is the ultimate position for me. I kept moving my seat between 33% and 43% and somehow I always end up at 38%. No joke. It is the truth.

Ignore Millercarbon’s comment. He would never let someone else’s obviously superior knowledge get in the way of his bravado. Odds are he didn’t even read it.

The article is targeted at near field monitor usage with emphasis on accurate frequency response for best mixing. Pretty much the article is spot on. Many audiophiles who have no clue how acoustics work just parrot others rules of thumb. Getting the speakers far into the room, in a small room, is one of those. This article explains why that is often a problem, but also says you need both acoustic treatment AND equalization to fix the resulting placement, but at least the final result will work properly while a speaker far from an untreated wall will leave you with a result that can’t be fixed and even if treated may not work properly.

It’s a good article in my opinion.

Just read the other article. They pretty much say the same thing and both are good. This was the one in your replies.

In Ethan's section on Real Traps he says 38% rule from front or back wall and then clarifies that's purely theoretical and is best measured.

Oh, that should be FRONT wall not back wall.

When Mike Lavigne built his room he hired an acoustics expert, not you Miller and you still fail to understand it is not simply about a recording studio (where the sound YOU listen to was created) but about understanding the REAL impact of speaker placement and acoustic treatments and equalization on actual sound output, not perceived impacts from limited experience and limited knowledge.   Mike knew his limits and hired someone.

In a small room putting speakers far into the room is often not possible. In a large room that is not dedicated or a home theater room that may also not be possible. However, if you understand the mechanisms at play then you can use speaker placement close to the wall with little negative impact. Understanding room nodes, symmetry, and measurement further improves setup.  Some people have more tools in their toolbox than a hammer.

I wish I could push my speakers against the wall and get good sound but that hasn't been possible with the loudspeakers I owned in the last 45 years. YMMV.

May I suggest reading the articles the op has posted then. That will tell you how to do it .


The long wall is rarely the best place because room modes are much closer together which makes placement difficult to impossible. Of course, if you are never treating the reflections off the side walls, then the long wall may be better to keep the speakers farther away from those walls.

The best nearfield system I put together had the loudspeakers 5 feet out into the room and the seat 6 feet from that in a tiny room.

Okay, we are already 11 feet to the seating position from the front wall. We are no longer talking about a tiny room as I certainly hope that seating position was not close to the back wall. If it was close to the back wall, then it was no where near ideal unless there was serious acoustic treatment on the back wall which can be quite difficult to do well.

My gosh look at the people without an understanding of acoustics (probably who didn't even read the article in detail) puffing their chests.

While bipolar and omnidirectional speakers obviously were not a consideration for any of those articles, Klipsch would still come into consideration and for any normal dynamic speaker, it would come into play.  Really how many of the people responding actually read the article in full and understood it before replying?  Thank you Erik for obviously digging deep enough to see the comment w.r.t. damping.

russ69, the long wall is rarely the best wall for speaker placement.

twoleftears:  Sorry the 2nd sentence is absolutely correct, but your wrong conclusion is certainly possible if you didn't actually read the article or understand it.

For those of you far more interested in extolling your "expertise" instead of learning, the articles very clearly discuss the aspects of moving your speakers into the room. Heck, they even talk about the distance from the front wall, and what frequencies that causes issues with, and how far they need to be out from the wall, even dependent on the frequency response of the speaker. IF you had read and understood the articles instead of being keyboard warriors, maybe you would have discovered that.


If you can't move your speakers out from the wall, which can be often the case in small rooms, home theaters, small mixing studios, etc. then you need to deal with having the speakers close to the wall, and if they have to be close to the wall, it is often better to have them really close. Why? ... well if you read the articles you would know. It is because of the frequencies affected, the closer to the wall, the higher the frequencies and the easier to address with acoustic treatment.  Will you get boundary reinforcement. Yes. Do the articles address this? Yes. Again, if you read that, you would know that.

The articles were written by people who obviously have a much deeper understanding of speaker placement, acoustics, and general implementation than most of those commenting.

Your Maggies and Martin Logan's may not work as noted, that article was not targeting this type of speaker. However your Triangles, with the proper acoustic treatment would. Just because a speakers name is Triangle does not change the physics of acoustics.

I beg to differ ieales. The usage is different, but acoustics does not magically change, and goals acoustically need to be similar. Read the articles in detail. The acoustic properties they discuss are universal, but very few have ever done the work to place speakers close to a wall and address issues both from an acoustic treatment standpoint and an equalization standpoint.  The articles clearly discuss these issues. They don't say this is the only optimum method, they do say it can have optimum properties by placing the rear wall and hence rear wall reflection as far away as possible hence removing its interaction in the listening experience. That of course does not change for home listening either.

Not a recording engineer, but spent much of my life in the technical ends of the recording industry to pretty intimately familiar.

"In the studio, we don’t listen to music. We listen to instruments, voices and mixes.

"B I G difference."

Oh?  How so within the framework of acoustics or perceptive differences?

The usage is different, but acoustics does not magically change, and goals acoustically need to be similar.

Control room acoustics are nothing like home.

The article was not about professional control rooms. Did you read the article? It was talking about setting up a mixing studio. 



I can only expect that most people who are posting here didn't take the time to read the articles in any depth and / or are commenting without understanding the articles.



They are practically how to articles on either speaker placement close to a wall and also far from a wall and whether near field, small speaker or large speaker does not matter. The methodologies and same decision making process must still be applied for optimum results.