Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

Additional note

This book does not discuss speaker placement, and speaker placement is usually affected by room size. If you're building, you have the option of thinking about how you'd like to position the speakers in relation to the listening position (speaker width, listening distance, listening position in relation to rear wall, etc) and then use one of the speaker placement theories to determine the room size needed to support that placement. Stereophile Archives has Jonathan Scull's "Fine Tunes" survey of speaker placement info.

I remember seeing a formula on the Genelec site in one of their FAQs which enabled you to calculate how far in front of the wall the speaker should be if you wished to avoid cancellations from the wall reflection. For my Dynaudio Contour 1.3 SEs with a -3 dB point of 37 Hz, that amounted to a bit over 10 feet if I remember correctly so that would imply a room around 22 ft long (Immedia - Audio Physic method), 33 ft long (rule of thirds), 44 ft long (placement at quarter length for bass reinforcement), or ... if you insert figures calculated from some other theory. As you can see, trying to work back to a room size from speaker placement info can result in some very different figures. It's probably easier to pick a room size that'll fit your house plans, ensure the room dimensions are reasonably proportioned, and then do the usual approach to speaker placement within that space since you're probably going to have to fudge things a bit anyway if you calculate the room size from a desired speaker placement anyway.

David Aiken


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  • Additional note - David Aiken 13:14:54 01/06/02 (0)


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