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General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

Speaker placement

Re low bass in rooms - I think this is one of the areas that is subject to gross misunderstanding. Very low bass can be heard in small spaces - listening to even a normal setup without subwoofer in a small car should be enough to convince anyone of this. If you couldn't hear notes with a wavelength longer than the room's longest dimension, you shouldn't be able to hear notes lower than 75 Hz (a 15 ft wavelength) in your room and that means you couldn't hear the lowest octave on a double bass or bass guitar, or even the bottom octave and a bit of a piano. You also wouldn't be able to hear notes lower than 150-200 Hz in a small car which means you wouldn't even be able to hear the lowest notes of some singers, much less almost any note from a double bass or bass guitar. I can assure you that all of those ranges are audible in your room and in a small car, and ranges even lower than those as well. A bit of listening should convince absolutely everyone of this fact but for some reason this belief never goes away.

For what it's worth, I can hear test tones down to 31.5 hz in my room which is where my speakers roll off too far for audibility. The wavelength of a 31.5 Hz note is around 36', far longer than any dimension of my room which is around 17' by 13', not much bigger than yours, with a 10' by 10' extension opening off the long wall on one side so the longest dimension is actually 23', a long way short of the wavelength of a 31.5 Hz note. The low frequency limit in your room is set by the speaker's performance, not the room's dimensions. I also place the speakers on the long side - that isn't a problem.

I use the Audio Physic method with speakers half way between the front and back walls and listen against the wall or rather where the wall would be if my room didn't take a bit of a bend there. My speakers are placed at quarter points from the side walls. You can use this kind of approach and place the speakers a quarter of the way from front to back instead of half way. It works well for me in my room, but speakers in the centre of the room don't work well in a living room. My room serves only as a listening room so speaker placement isn't an issue.

Other grids include a grid of quarters rather than the thirds you've tried.

There are other methods not based on grids like the Cardas which uses a mathematical formula and which I think doesn't come up with useable placements in a small room that is close to a square - it's based on a rectangular room with dimensions ideally related to each other by a factor of approx. 1.61. There's also the Wilson method which involves a process of listening and marking off on a grid pasted to the floor. There are links to all of these in the FAQ. There are also placements along a diagonal which can be good in rooms that are square or almost so, and there's some mention of them in the material on the Harmon Kardon site. I haven't tried that approach but Floyd Toole seems to like it.

What all of these methods are going to do is to reinforce or cancel various room nodes and frequencies to different degrees. One will work best in one room and another will work best in a different room. The dimensions of your room play a huge part in which will work best for you. There's also the issue of which methods are practical in your room - what works in a dedicated listening room may not work in a living room where furniture and other uses dictate that the speakers simply won't go in some locations, regardless of how desirable the sound improvement would be.

There are links to most of these methods in the FAQ.

Also, on the Rives Audio site (don't have a URL but you can do a google search) they have a scaled down version of the CARA software that allows you to experiment with various placements and see what their effect will be on a range of speakers. If your speaker is on their list, you're in luck. Otherwise I'd pick a speaker of a similar physical size and frequency response and play with that to get a rough idea.

Apart from the above and the FAQ, you're going to have to work it out yourself given your room and the uses you make of it.

David Aiken



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  • Speaker placement - David Aiken 15:40:09 05/28/03 (1)


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