Five feet from the front wall

A long time ago I noticed a big improvement moving my speakers so the backs of them (which has ports for the bass) are 3 feet from the wall behind them. It was surprising because I didn't move them out all that much. Maybe 6 inches. I have a credenza between them that is about 2-1/2 feet high which probably increased the improvement a lot since the speakers are now an inch or two in front of the credenza.

FYI- the sound also improved a lot when putting my speakers (KEF R500s) on top of multilayered Symposium acoustics stealth platforms. Supposedly it cleans up the vibrations inside the cabinet while also isolating it from vibrations from my suspended floor. All I know is it sounds clearer and more focused.

Based on my extensive experience with speaker placement in various sized rooms over the years, I've found that speakers, in almost every case, sounded better farther out into the room.  Just go to any High End Audio Show, and in 99.9% of the exhibitors rooms, you'll find that these experts always place their speakers out into the room several to many feet from the front wall.  Placing the speakers out into the room helps to create greater depth of field within the soundstage, which creates spaciousness, and that lovely layering and airy effect that we all search for in our own rooms.

@mijostyn, I expect you intended "It is .  .  ." when you said, "If is extremely hard to over dampen a room."

But I guess it is not impossible.  Several years ago I had a friend who was a reviewer for one online audio magazine.  Being serious about the task he hired a then well-known acoustics company to advise him on room treatments.  That resulted in installation of a large number of Tube Traps plus several panel absorbers, along with an array of diffusers suspended from the ceiling.  At first he was pleased but after a few weeks became dissatisfied that so much dynamics and "life" seemed to be missing.

At his invitation another friend and myself came over to help.  One by one we eliminated most of the tube traps while he listened to a couple of reference recordings.  After about six traps had been removed he found the sense of dynamics and aliveness he'd been missing.  So he sold the excess traps.

it's easy to over damp a room for hi-fi..we generally like the reverb of our rooms...but control rooms don't want the room involved...they of course aren't listening for enjoyment. 

So this is the challenge...the panel sellers don't really understand hi-fi goals so they will tell you to kill your sidewall first reflections and also to put a cloud on your ceiling to kill that first ceiling reflection...all those spatial cues we love they correctly see as colorations.

Floyd Toole discovered during the Harmon studies that people generally don't like the first reflection absorbed for music...but the dogma to kill first reflection points persists and is repeated in every corner on the internet. ;-)