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In Reply to: RE: Aren't you taking a huge risk? posted by Daverz on July 03, 2009 at 12:29:05
As someone who also has a non-rectangular room (mine is L-shaped with one corner cut off at 45 degrees and 2 permanently open archway entrances on the side with the bend in it, one leading to a hallway and the other to the kitchen and a large open plan area) I can sympathise with your comment that "You just have to go right to trial and error."
The one thing I have found from experience is that a placement which puts the speakers as far out from the walls as you can manage coupled with sitting a little closer so that you ensure that the first reflection paths are relatively long compared to the length of the direct sound paths tends to work well. This sort of setup weakens the level of the reflected sound relative to the direct sound and therefore reduces the room effects to some degree. The Audio Physic method works on this principle but the principle can certainly be adopted to irregular shaped rooms.
If you have the freedom to use some acoustic treatments you can further minimise the strength of the first reflections which should help even further since I suspect most of the problems in irregular rooms stem from differences in the reflected sound from the left and right sides of the room. Those differences can move the centre image off axis, even move it different amounts off axis at different frequencies if there is a difference in the frequency balances of the left and right side reflected sound, and cause tonal and other imaging problems. Reducing the strength of the first reflections in an irregular shaped room, especially differences from left to right more than front to back, should reduce a lot of the problems caused by the room shape.
Unfortunately this approach probably won't work at its best with speakers that are intended for placement close to walls and which rely on the presence of walls to achieve their intended frequency response.
David Aiken
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