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Posts: 5112
Location: Brisbane
Joined: September 25, 1999
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You haven't described the room well.
You talk about knee walls on the long walls so it sounds like the ceiling rises from both long walls to a peak in the middle, but you also say "different angled/height knee walls" which suggests that the long walls may not be identical and that the peak may not be in the middle unless the angle of slope on both sides of the ceiling is different. Also you talk about a 6' high ceiling. Is that the minimum or maximum height? What is the height of the long walls lowest ceiling height, for both sides if they are different) and what is the maximum height of the ceiling? Is the peak at the middle of the room or more to one side than the other?
And you say the "listening area is 10' by 12'". What are the actual room dimensions.
Providing some actual room dimensions will help people to visualise the space and make better suggestions.
As Frihed89 says, near field setups or similar are very useful, but not only in small spaces but in difficult spaces because they reduce the level of the reflected sound relative to the direct sound and that reduces the "signature" of your room in what you hear. It's hard to say whether increasing the listening distance will make a good or bad difference, especially without knowing what the speakers are. You need a certain amount of space between you and the speaker for the sound from the different drivers to integrate properly but the amount of space needed varies from speaker to speaker depending on number of drivers and design and you haven't told us what your speakers are. The manufacturer often gives good advice on listening distance and you probably don't want to listen too much closer than the manufacturer suggests, and preferably no closer than they suggest. That issue alone may force whether you need to place the speakers on the short wall.
Provided you can get enough listening distance for a long wall placement, I'd suggest reading the Audio Physic placement method which can be found in the FAQ here and experimenting with it. It's actually going to put you a little closer to the speakers because they're going to end up in the middle of the room and you're going to end up against the wall, and that may not be possible because you need to consider head height under the ceiling which is lower at the wall.
If that doesn't work, I'd try the same method on the short wall and see how that goes.
BUT—if the ceiling slopes aren't symmetrical and/or the ceiling peak is not in the centre of the room, you're going to have problems with a short wall setup because of the asymmetrical ceiling. If you have different slopes/angles and you're doing a long wall setup, it's going to make a difference which long wall you set up against and I'd have the speakers under the shallower slope and/or the ceiling peak closer to the rear of the room rather than the front (speaker) end of the room.
With any asymmetrical room, the simple fact is that in the end you are going to have to experiment and try different options. The asymmetry makes it difficult to predict what's going to happen and the only way to find out is to try it. Sometimes what looks better in theory doesn't end up sounding better to you in practice, and even my suggestions above may not be the best. I've lived with asymmetrical rooms for 30 years now in my current and previous houses and I have yet to find a system that has worked for me without some experimentation. Even in symmetrical rooms there are any number of recommended setup methods and they all work, some better in some rooms than in others due to room dimensions, but they all put the speakers and listening positions in different places and they all give different results. Different people also have different preferences for the sort of sound they like, so some methods will be more to their liking than others. Bear in mind also that the speaker designer often designs for a certain sort of placement and you need to follow their recommendations if you want to get optimum tonal balance.
The simple fact is that there is no simple set of instructions for how and where to place speakers and listening position that works for all people and all rooms but you can get a good starting point by reading the setup FAQ articles here, deciding which of them have speaker placements which don't conflict too much with your speaker manufacturer's recommendations, then picking the one which fits in best with your particular room's size and shape and starting from there. You may have to experiment with small variations in speaker and listening position for best results but if the initial result is way off what you like you probably need to consider another one of the setup methods rather than making fine adjustments on the one you started with.
Sorry but ultimately some trial and error is going to be necessary. It tends to be necessary even in symmetrical rooms and it's unavoidable in rooms which aren't symmetrical boxes.
David Aiken
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RE: Strange speaker question ? - David Aiken 13:13:33 11/09/09
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