Balance control vs. Speaker placement


For whatever reason, my system always slightly favors the left, my guess would be the furniture on the left vs. nothing on the right. I have used several amps and speakers and the left is always slightly favored.

I have a test CD that exposes this in greater detail. On this CD they suggest that you either move a speaker forward or back to compensate instead of adjusting the balance control. Any thoughts as why this is prefered? It sure is easier to dial it in with the balance control.
brianmgrarcom
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.
I would suggest that you measure the speaker and room response of each channel independently. See if there are certain frequencies that are being attenuated by the room in one channel more so than the other. As previously mentioned an opening or other asymetrical occurance in the room can throw off the balance. Once you find what the frequencies are being affected you can make some modifications in terms of accoustical treatments to the other side to balance things out. If you are lucky, the frequencies affected are on the high side (say 1k and up), and then some absorbing material (sonex, RPG, or ownes corning panels) may be all you need. If the problem is lower, it's still a solvable problem, but likely more complex.