Audio2design, you are ruining everyone's mythology!
The rules of acoustics do not change for someone's convenience, but there are practicalities in the home environment that prevent optimal positioning of speakers. In the studio you can construct a wall specifically designed and angled for speakers so they can be flush. In a home the walls being at best 6 inches thick will not house an entire speaker and the wall is most likely flat pointing the speaker past the optimum 16 inches behind your head. Many speakers such as Wilsons are not flat.
Then there are the types of speakers that are used at home that are totally inappropriate for flush mounting such as dipoles of various sorts.
Paul Klipsch was very clever back in the day. His speakers were designed to be in corners and right up against the wall. They were so efficient that the flea watt amps of the period could drive them to thunderous levels. They remain popular to this day!
Using the short wall I would think would be obvious by now. Keeping the subwoofer drivers as close to the wall as possible is extremely important if you do not want huge variations in bass response throughout the room.
Even with a swarm system the drivers should be against a wall for efficiency reasons.
Using speakers that are directional in some way can help quite a bit. Dipoles and horns are good examples. They limit reflections reducing interference effects. My personal favorite is the line source dipole which dramatically reduces reflections the only caveats being that you have to deaden the wall behind the speaker and shift to subwoofers at some point. Even so you do not want to keep the speaker far from the wall. 3 feet is the maximum. Assuming you are using subwoofers and high pass filters you can keep the inside edges almost touching the wall. Big speakers like Sound Labs become the wall.
The rules become more important for standard dynamic speakers as they are much less directional. Keeping them close to the wall deadening the first reflection points works best. As always shifting to subwoofers helps to manage the bass.
If you really want to optimize your situation you have to impulse test your room with a calibrated mike. Then you can see the frequency response of your system nicely graphed out. There are many brands available. But then you have to be able to do something about it and that is where room control comes in. If you purchase a DEQX Premate you get the microphone and the works. You can equalize the system digitally so the response is perfectly flat at the listening position and then you can tailor the response however you like. There are other brands available such as Anthem, Trinnov and now Mcintosh makes a unit. IMHO Trinnov is the best followed by DEQX which is the best value. Computer based systems are difficult to coordinate if you use more than two channels such as with subwoofers where you are using 4 channels.
This article is a great starting point. It covers the basic concepts and gives you a good idea what you are dealing with even if we do not have studio mixing rooms in our houses. Everybody has their own situation and different solution may be required. What I can say for sure is that you will have a more enjoyable system if you start from a flat frequency response. It is absolutely the best reference point. If you do not know where you are starting, you can't possibly know were you are going to wind up. I have tested some very large SOTA systems and seen some very wild frequency response curves.
The rules of acoustics do not change for someone's convenience, but there are practicalities in the home environment that prevent optimal positioning of speakers. In the studio you can construct a wall specifically designed and angled for speakers so they can be flush. In a home the walls being at best 6 inches thick will not house an entire speaker and the wall is most likely flat pointing the speaker past the optimum 16 inches behind your head. Many speakers such as Wilsons are not flat.
Then there are the types of speakers that are used at home that are totally inappropriate for flush mounting such as dipoles of various sorts.
Paul Klipsch was very clever back in the day. His speakers were designed to be in corners and right up against the wall. They were so efficient that the flea watt amps of the period could drive them to thunderous levels. They remain popular to this day!
Using the short wall I would think would be obvious by now. Keeping the subwoofer drivers as close to the wall as possible is extremely important if you do not want huge variations in bass response throughout the room.
Even with a swarm system the drivers should be against a wall for efficiency reasons.
Using speakers that are directional in some way can help quite a bit. Dipoles and horns are good examples. They limit reflections reducing interference effects. My personal favorite is the line source dipole which dramatically reduces reflections the only caveats being that you have to deaden the wall behind the speaker and shift to subwoofers at some point. Even so you do not want to keep the speaker far from the wall. 3 feet is the maximum. Assuming you are using subwoofers and high pass filters you can keep the inside edges almost touching the wall. Big speakers like Sound Labs become the wall.
The rules become more important for standard dynamic speakers as they are much less directional. Keeping them close to the wall deadening the first reflection points works best. As always shifting to subwoofers helps to manage the bass.
If you really want to optimize your situation you have to impulse test your room with a calibrated mike. Then you can see the frequency response of your system nicely graphed out. There are many brands available. But then you have to be able to do something about it and that is where room control comes in. If you purchase a DEQX Premate you get the microphone and the works. You can equalize the system digitally so the response is perfectly flat at the listening position and then you can tailor the response however you like. There are other brands available such as Anthem, Trinnov and now Mcintosh makes a unit. IMHO Trinnov is the best followed by DEQX which is the best value. Computer based systems are difficult to coordinate if you use more than two channels such as with subwoofers where you are using 4 channels.
This article is a great starting point. It covers the basic concepts and gives you a good idea what you are dealing with even if we do not have studio mixing rooms in our houses. Everybody has their own situation and different solution may be required. What I can say for sure is that you will have a more enjoyable system if you start from a flat frequency response. It is absolutely the best reference point. If you do not know where you are starting, you can't possibly know were you are going to wind up. I have tested some very large SOTA systems and seen some very wild frequency response curves.