Best Speaker Placement Rules you've used?

Put them where they sound good.

Seriously.

Hi,

I used the Cardas style method as well, following Diagramm C. Mainly because my room is 10.5 x 17 ft, exactly in the golden ratio. It worked really well, although I thought the palcement looked ridiculaous at first.

Furthermore, here is a great free link to Ultimate AV website (Don't run away because of the V in the titel), which offers an Excel spreadsheat to calculate room modes. The sheat further calculates the frequency peaks and nulls at your listening position.

Excel calculation

All you need to do is enter your room dimensions and seating position and you get all the data you need. Nice way to play around with the seating position.

The programm also works for speaker placement since you want to avoid the speaker to sit a null point or maxima.

The interesting thing is: I took some measurements of my system/room a while ago using a corrected Radio Shack SPL meter, and I could see all the predicted "nulls" as little dips in the measured spectrum.

This is a really nice way of playing around and given my measurements it seems to work.

AND MOST IMPORTANT: Besides all this theory, don't forget to listen, your ears will tell you the best location. But the calculations might be a good starting point.

Enjoy!

Rene

Hey Newbee how do you find that program on the Rives site ? Thanks Larry

On Audiogon - dammed if I know. He used to have a site on Audiogon, but I can't find it now.

HOWEVER!!!!!! Go to Audio Asylum - Rives is listed as a sponsor where he has all his products and a forum. Down load his Cara program - this should do it for you.

How about a step by step process for interpreting what the spreadsheet is telling us, how you use it with the Radio Shack SPL meter, and how you go about using the data to change your speaker placements and room treatments?

- tell us more about nulls and how the SPL meter predicts them, among othe things; Thx

- I read the link, but I still don't get it fully

Thanks!