I have found HIGH CEILINGS and LACK OF CARPETING just won't allow you to hear what your speakers can deliver. I've been in both low and high ceilings... carpeted and tile covered flooring. Huge difference.
Two surprising things I found that improved my imaging and staging...
... First off I have a odd room for my two channel listening and have been getting beat up trying to find proper placement. I have been reading a lot here and on the inter web and decided to use the room setup calculator on the Cardas site. ( http://www.cardas.com/room_setup_calculators.php )
#1 was how close to each other the speakers are now. I wouldn’t have placed them that close together.
#2 was that the best imaging and staging is with zero toe in.
Having a hard time wrapping my head around these changes but it’s the best my system has sounded since I finished the putting it together. lol
#1 was how close to each other the speakers are now. I wouldn’t have placed them that close together.
#2 was that the best imaging and staging is with zero toe in.
Having a hard time wrapping my head around these changes but it’s the best my system has sounded since I finished the putting it together. lol
53 responses Add your response
"It depends" is the fundamental law in small room acoustic for me...Because we must change a room with our ears and for them when listening a SPECIFIC speaker in the room...The frequencies response of the room in the vocal timbre bandwidth is the pilot guide to do this...You "bent" the room to what is better for your ears listening human voice with an active mechanical modification of the pressure zones distribution grid in the room not only with panels reflective, absorbing and diffusive in a passive treatment...... Why human voice? Because the inner relation we have with all acoustical cues linked to the timbre of a human voice and his MEANING for us...All of us we can identify a correct timbre FOR EACH ONE OF US but which will not be "exactly" the same for none others save us...Then our small room must be fine tuned for our own ears/speakers specifically for a better human voice and instrument recognition when playing a note... A great musical hall is not a small room....Acoustic laws cannot be used in the same way in this 2 cases....For example the use of reverberation time and the timing of the different first wavefronts cannot be the same in a great Hall and in my 13 feet square room... No recipe works well for all small room because of their different geometry, topology and acoustical varied content... No recipe will never compete or replace fine tuning of the small room... But at the end this fine tuning of passive acoustic treatment and active mechanical control of any small room is the greater of all audio possible improvement with a specific pair of speakers...Greater than most upgrades of gear .... Small room acoustic must be designed for specific speakers in specific small room... A "tweak" like putting a rug can help, but we are short of a true fine tuning with some easy recipe of this nature only... Fine tuning is related to listening experiments and time but at possible low cost in my experience.... And any electronical equalization is a TOOL, not the solution at all... For sure a dedicated audio room is the only essential luxury in audiophile world... I am not a scientist, but it is my experience with my room... |
Regarding rear wall and stuff between the speakers. I find it highly dependent on the speakers. My ribbon speakers didn’t seem to care that much about low racks (2.5’) in between and liked the bare painted sheet rock behind them. My Sonus Faber Amati Traditional sound much better without the rack in between and with a thick Afghan rug covering the entire wall behind the speakers. Also, while the rule of thumb with my speakers is to toe them in to converge ~18” behind the listener… they sound much better in my room with no toe-in what so ever. So, for me, it depends. |
Cardas method based on OPs link seems to address tempering bass response in the room....only. Based on multiple reads, some people feel once you take care of bass all else falls into place. I agree with previous poster, following cardas puts my speakers so darn deep into the room, can’t have it. another method is to start with speakers against rear wall and inch them out until Bass calms down. add owners manuals instructions for placement and it explains why I get nuts and move speakers so many times. my personal favorite is to start with both speakers smug against rear wall, 2-3 ft in from side walls. Bring one speaker out until you only hear vocals coming from that speaker. Then bring out the other speaker until the vocals are centered again. Finally toe in until vocals are not more than 2ft wide. **2people needed for this method. finally, you can call John Ruttan to come over to help you out with his ears and measuring instruments . I’ve seriously considered this but fear I may come away from the experience with an upgraded part I didn’t know I needed (but may very well love having). |
One of the biggest mistakes, IMHO, made with spkr placement is many people instinctually place them way too far apart. Thinking it will present a large stage, image etc.. This will usually have the opposite effect and will damage the overall SQ. It "may" seem like its large, but once moved to proper center to center distance (as well as the other dimensions), things lock in and SQ is improved significantly many times. The 1/3 rule and cardas calculation are good starting points / ballpark and reveals how far off people miss the space between, distance from side and rear walls. Understanding shared spaces present a lot of restrictions on placement, so it's always a compromise and there are no exact formulas for placement, just guidelines - but those guidelines (physics) usually provide pretty consistent results. However, if you have the ability to at least try some of these "guidelines" its worth it, for no other reason than getting experience. Even better, when the wife is gone, remove some of the furniture "in the way" temporarily, move the spkrs out into the room as well as play with the listening position, just to hear what your system can or should sound like. Understanding your room acoustically is massively important. It does take work though. It really comes down to how much effort one wants to put in getting the most out of your rig and good enough is totally fine if that's what suits you. |
| Post removed |
http://www.acoustic.ua/forms/calculator4.en.html Here's a site where you populate in detail your room dimensions including ceiling height, the locations of you speakers, the height of the speaker drivers, your listening position, your seated ear height and the program will show you the 1st reflection points on all the walls, the ceiling and the floor of your room. Good tool vs. the mirror method. |
In my listening/TV room l have my two channel & 5.1 HT systems in a low console My room has vaulted ceilings and my listening position is eleven from my Maggie’s l have six feet from the center of my speakers to the side walls For critical listening l grab my tape measure and position my Maggie’s four feet from the wall and nine feet apart with slight toe in All measurements are within + - 1/8 inch and symmetrical Typically l find this setup to give me the best soundstage with excellent inner detail I’ve tried numerous speaker locations so don’t be afraid to experiment I have located my speakers twelve feet apart and six feet into the room and all over the map, just to hear the results and confirm if l have my speakers in the best position Now when l get real bored l start messing with my two sub woofers locations, but not too often as they weigh 100 lb’s each! |
And it’s a whole lot of fun to play with setup! :)I will not call connecting and disconnecting highly cosly amplifiers or speakers one after the other "fun" save for a reviewer perhaps... It is more fun to reach OPTIMAL S.Q. for a chosen system in a chosen room,for my "chosen" ears, studying acoustic with information, experiments and listenings... After all, really creating a good setup has nothing to do with changing components each month.... But perhaps it is me who are crazy, or worst, too poor to buy all these stuff...Then in the obligation to resolve myself and my thinking to be about less elevated "high end" matter than a new piece of gear : acoustic... 😊 |
As with all parameters of sound quality, the spectrum of performance based on location and toe in is variable, and subject to highly personalized preferences. One typically cannot capture the entire range of parameters of sound quality desired and maximize them all with one setup. It is usually a preferred set of compromises. And it's a whole lot of fun to play with setup! :) |
@gp4jesus using ht for stereo and setting that up is beyond my pay grade. In stereo systems, first reflection points at side walls and ceiling should be first place for room treatments. I'd suggest diffusion is best for all first reflection points, absorption will deaden the sound. Diffusion also works well for center of front wall. Toe in and width between speakers work in concert, the further you space the speakers the more toe in is usually required. Get the ratio right and you'll attain the widest sound stage and still retain strong center image. As previously mentioned there are no hard and fast rules for speaker placement in any particular room and system. Multiple owners of any particular speaker will likely end up with speakers in different positions relative to side walls, front walls, toe in and spacing. The best advice I can give is to experiment, you may be amazed to find previously unthought of positioning may be optimum. Also, not too many rooms are perfectly symmetrical, mine being one that isn't, this requires different positioning for each speaker. |
willy-t Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the goal to get a solid center soundstage, great sound,and the speakers disappear? Towing in too much gives away the location of the speaker. Speakers big enough I guess would need to be towed. Still, once the truck leaves I think you will find they disappear just fine once they are positioned precisely equidistant and symmetrical. |
Two surprising things I found that improved my imaging and staging. Best for sound stage imagine and depth is to have nothing between the speakers (even the wall) just have a small wall section behind the speakers for bass loading. https://ibb.co/1MDg242 Cheers George |
Since I moved from a 1200 sq ft listening space in NYC to a 550 sq ft listening space in The Hudson River Valley, my speakers give me the greatest natural balance, detail and spaciousness when pointed straight out, not toed in, and when making the space between each and the side walls equal to or slightly greater than the space between the speakers themselves. |
Agree with follow your ears through the journey. In my experience, having nearfield or having a television involves being closer to the speakers. I notice that most deep bass then is harder to create since long waveforms need room. Some things are lost in this configuration you just may not know are missing. Also placement and toe in are great ways to listen and understand how the speaker interacts. For years I have had my Maggie’s with the tweeters inside. For fun I swapped them to the outside and to me it’s radically more listenable. Positioning speakers in your room is far preferable to swapping out equipment or cords to learn what sounds good to you. |
Staying away from toe-in might be minimizing cross wall first reflections while maintaining same side wall reflections, which are now reduced in volume and slightly more delayed by having the speakers further from the wall, thereby minimizing or perhaps even optimizing comb filtering effects. Same side wall reflections tend to widen the soundstage. Cross wall first reflections can be a mixed bag, often not helping with imaging but under the right circumstances might help with spaciousness without harming the imaging. In your smaller space they probably aren’t helpful. Having the speakers closer together helps to solidify the center image. |
All this from system that costs less than $500 and no ac treatments or room treatments?No you are wrong here... My room is treated completely with passive reflective diffusive and absorbing surfaces... Not only that but my room is actively controlled by a grid of more than 40 tuned Helmoltlz resonators and diffusers ... I call that a "mechanical equalizer" created after Helmoltz method and many over devices ( a Schuman generators grid and a ionizers grid etc) i will not spoke about here all of my creations homemade.... I dont bought tweaks , i create mine... My motto is: Dont upgrade BEFORE embedding mechanically against vibration and electrically decreasiing the HOUSE noise floor, and especially never before working passively with acoustic material surfaces and actively with Helmholtz mechanical devices control your room... I can only say this, and I’m not being facitious, I’m rather envious of you. Perhaps, my obsession and others, with reaching for highest sound quality has all been a waste of time. Just as with the phantom center image, it’s all delusion anyway. If I had the perceptive powers you have I needn’t have spent all this money and obsessed over every single detail in this needless pursuit.You could be envious in a way, because even if my low cost well chosen system is not the best ever, most people here own better system than mine but they are not well embedded and especially put on non treated and non controlled room acoustically, my system though is one of the best possible for his PRICE/S.Q. ratio.... This is the reason why i smile at the idea to upgrade my system ... I already calculated the cost for a true upgrade from my system of 500 bucks : 15,000 us dollars at least and perhaps more for example from my Sansui AU 7700 to a Berning ZOTL 40 amplifier... But this upgrade even if it will be a real one is not so much appealing because of what i really already have for the price of peanuts... Audiophile experience is mainly acoustic for at least the bigger half part.... 😁😊 Marketing is not science.... Acoustic is a science... |
“And don't have any equipment on high racks between speakers. Not having anything other than room treatments between speakers is perhaps the most important thing in getting 3d imaging. You can have equipment low to ground, anything higher than 20" or so starts affecting my sound stage.” This post pertain to using a 5 channel HT system for 2 channel listening. 1. Should I put sound absorption on the left and right of my center channel speaker*/amp stand?*top of same between 36 & 38” from the floor. 2. Pull out my 42” high LR towers a few inches so my center front baffle is several inches behind the LR front baffles? Towers’ tweeters’ measure center to center ~11’. I could also push back the center speaker 2-4”. |
baylinor hit the spot. And I'll second the recommendation of Jim Smith's book. In any case, it is certainly true that room acoustics are too often an overlooked element in one's system, every bit as important as any component—and "free" to experiment with. Of course, unless your listening room was purpose-built, there will be compromises, the notorious WAF being one (hence, not completely "free"). I have a pair of Scientific Fidelity Tesla speakers that I love, even against half a dozen high-end replacements I've auditioned in my listening space over the years and decades. You've never heard of these, probably, because Corey Greenberg gave them a bad review in Stereophile when they came out, and Mike Maloney's new audio company never recovered. But, at least in my space, they handily out-perform speakers Stereophile and other magazines awarded various accolades to, and which cost orders of magnitude more. Mr. Maloney recommended toeing in his Teslas, and I've found they sound best toed in even more, to the point that their trajectories meet about two feet IN FRONT of my face. Their one deficit is that they tend to be a bit bright in the upper midrange, and this is tamed somewhat by having them off-axis. Also, extreme toe-in improves imaging for listeners sitting to the immediate left or right of the sweet spot, since that set-up has the more distant speaker facing the off-center listener straight on. Finally, this configuration is surely made optimal by my unusual room: very high trapezoidal ceiling, with the speakers sitting at the left and right of a large stone arch that opens into the entrance foyer of the house, so there is no wall behind them (although there are side walls, from which the speakers are several feet distant). Imaging with this configuration is simply astonishing. I can "watch" particular instruments (with eyes closed!), which makes it easier to follow individual lines of counterpoint. The clarinet is clearly sitting to the left or right of the oboe, and the horns are clearly further back. Such imaging is much more vivid than it would be at a live concert, and yet feels in no way "enhanced" or unnatural. |
There is a local dealer that specializes in Master Setting speakers. I started out with my speakers closer to the back wall and as soon as I placed them 18 inches from the back wall and measure each speaker's distanced from the left and right wall they really sounded significantly better. I also made sure they were both pointed exactly to the listening position. |
ghdprentice…. Thank you, it’s been a long road. |
@Mahgister, your many posts and this latest in particular have finally compelled me to respond directly to you. And so, you have a total system that costs less than $500, you have computer screen and equipment directly between your speakers. Based on one of your recent posts you actually picture the performers in your room, all this with present system. You have over 6,000 posts, some insightful and meaningful. And so, I respect that you have some knowledge of audio based on previous posts. And based on those previous posts and ones on this thread I understand your hearing high resolution, natural timbre, well balanced tonality, three dimensional imaging, life size sound stage, deep reaching bass, extended highs from your system. All this from system that costs less than $500 and no ac treatments or room treatments? Either your perceptual powers pertaining to sound quality are singularly the highest I've observed in over thirty years of audio conversation, or you're simply delusional. It has taken me total expenditures reaching many multiples of $10k in any single system over quite a number of systems over twenty some years to reach the same level of sound quality! I can only say this, and I'm not being facitious, I'm rather envious of you. Perhaps, my obsession and others, with reaching for highest sound quality has all been a waste of time. Just as with the phantom center image, it's all delusion anyway. If I had the perceptive powers you have I needn't have spent all this money and obsessed over every single detail in this needless pursuit. Still, the important thing is to have personal enjoyment with whatever system your left with at the end of this journey. Obviously, you have and I have had two entirely different journeys, mine winding and difficult, yours seems rather easy in comparison. Both of us seem to be enjoying our systems. I do have some criticisms of your posts. What is the basis for your viewpoints? Do you have experience with a wide variety of equipment at various price points, with AC treatments, room treatments, tweaks in general? And I don't mean hearing about other's comments on these things, I mean actual ownership and use of these items within your system. And then, have you offered reviews of the wide variety of equipment you've actually experienced within your system? Again, I'll offer that you have made what seem to be knowledgeable and insightful comments over time. Are these your own based on experience or are you simply regurgitating other's comments? Regardless, you need to give up the objective stance, always insert your experience and/or in my opinion into the narrative. I look forward to your response. |
Speaker placement charts should all be taken with a grain of salt, including Cardas. None of them can take in account what kind of acoustic treatment you got in your room or the type of furniture and any other artifacts you may have including anything you hang on your walls. Meaning you may have a starting speaker placement with a chart reflecting the size of your room, but in the end you will have to move the speakers around little by little trusting your ears and the toe-in will end up being the most critical decision you make. Be patient, learn about YOUR system and take the time to ENJOY the journey. Being an audiophile is all about testing your system for your ears and not about finding a magic formula on paper.What a marvellous post... Wise and well written.... My deepest respect to you..... |
Sound waves reflect and diffuse off front wall as well as side walls, floor, ceiling and back wall. The phantom center image is an artifact of these interactions. Sound waves reflecting off relatively flat and hard surfaces such as equipment front fascias results in unnatural effects. Proper diffusion is created by varied depth surfaces that neither reflect or absorb excessively. I can only say try lowering the equipment rack and try some proper diffusion treatments on front wall, you should hear greater center image dimensionality. The detrimental effects of a high equipment rack will lessen if rack is further back from plane of speakers, really need to clear out space between speaker plane to at least a few feet back. |
Speaker placement charts should all be taken with a grain of salt, including Cardas. None of them can take in account what kind of acoustic treatment you got in your room or the type of furniture and any other artifacts you may have including anything you hang on your walls. Meaning you may have a starting speaker placement with a chart reflecting the size of your room, but in the end you will have to move the speakers around little by little trusting your ears and the toe-in will end up being the most critical decision you make. Be patient, learn about YOUR system and take the time to ENJOY the journey. Being an audiophile is all about testing your system for your ears and not about finding a magic formula on paper. |
@sns I have a hard time understanding why anything between the speakers would affect the soundstage: the sound doesn't come from between the speakers, but rather from the speakers on each side, which, in stereo make it sound like the sound is coming from between the speakers. Please explain your rationale. Thanks. |
Totally agree with you since I just did the same thing. I've been rearranging some furniture in my room to make room for a vintage system. My Dynaudio Special 40s in my main system were a little too close and not angled correctly. Once I moved them out more and turned them a bit---Wow! What a difference! More bass and better imaging. Cost $0. |
And don’t have any equipment on high racks between speakers. Not having anything other than room treatments between speakers is perhaps the most important thing in getting 3d imaging. You can have equipment low to ground, anything higher than 20" or so starts affecting my sound stage.My speakers are on my desk and between them there is a dac and amplifier and the computer screen.... 😁😁😁😁 The 3-D imaging dont comes from the interaction between the 2 speakers, but from the interaction between the speakers and the content and form of the room and his acoustical settings... I own an under 500 bucks system which is able to give me a soundstage filling the room... A 3-d imaging which is spectacular in my 2 listening positions on the same level : near listening and regular listening... The opposite impression about the necessity of an empty void between speakers comes from the fact that most people ignore the fact that what we are listening to is a complex set of waves crossing the average small room 15 times a fraction of second, then we never listen to an abstract addition of sound waves coming directly from the 2 speakers for sure, we listen to our entire system speakers/room with a complex grid pf pressure zones emerging and distributed in all the room in all directions...... For sure it is better or easier to have an empty space between the speakers but we can compensate by acoustic controls... Another myth is the claim that near listening eliminate the room problem.... It is completely false in small room... We listen to ALL the room even at 3 feet of the speakers.... The ears/brain "compute" all the room pressuring zones content to create sound... My acoustical material treatment and active acoustical controls modification in my room transformed completely the imaging, timbre perception and other acoustic qualities EVEN at my 3 feet listening from the speakers and on the same level of improvement than at my regular 8 feet location in my 13 feet "bad" small square room...... |
Each room and system is unique, requires unique speaker placement to some extent. I put tape on floor to mark locations for past speakers. And don't have any equipment on high racks between speakers. Not having anything other than room treatments between speakers is perhaps the most important thing in getting 3d imaging. You can have equipment low to ground, anything higher than 20" or so starts affecting my sound stage. |
mijostyn... It's not really a bright system per say I was placing the 10T's to close to the side walls evidently and bringing them closer together helped with staging... I now hear the music and the speakers melt into the music. I have a C41 Mac pre and a new A21+ with a dedicated DAC so things are simple and clean. Had a pair of Logans before the 10t's so I am searching for the large soundscape again. The Logans were the worst as far as durability... I replaced almost every driver and that was expensive. lol |