Balance control vs. Speaker placement

Another thing that will cause that is an unsemetrical room or a room with an opening on the side to another room. I cant give you the technical reasons but I have found trying to make this adjustment through the balance controls just doesnt sound as good as speaker adjustment. Yes it is much easier but the speakers just dont seem to blend right or as well.

Brian have you swapped around your source component interconnects so as to reverese Left & Right channels at various points along the signal path? You might have a marginal connection or cable, or even a component that's not within balance.

Hi Bob, I have noticed this for years in my system with numerous componants and they have been hooked and unhooked, I am sure it's the furniture that causes this.

I struggled with this for many months. It's bad enough that so many mastering engineers either seem to have worse hearing in one ear or a bad channel in their system, but to have to live with a non-symetrical listening environment is the pits. It sounds like you haven't tried acoustical treatments, which I highly recommend - check out some of the other threads. I believe that the balance control is frowned on if it adds an additional component to the signal path when it is off center. If this isn't the case, by all means use it (if the treatments don't work 100 percent). My purist preamp doesn't even have a balance control, so in the end, I actually replaced the gain resisters to get that last bit of shift.