Elevate Floorstanders to Ear Level?

You can raise the speaker one foot or you can tilt it back with similar results. However, raising the speaker will change the tonal balance due to distancing the speaker from a critical room boundry, the floor. This is the reason for Mapleshade's phylosophy of keeping the speaker close to the floor while tilting it back to aim the drivers at your ear level. I am not sure of the benefits with a desk sitting between you and your speakers. Try it and see if you like it.

The main idea with that is to get the tweeter a bit *above* ear height. What that does is smooth out a response wrinkle in the *upper mids*, not in the HF range...it's just that the usually quoted "tweeter above ear height" refers to the fact that the mid driver is virtually always located right underneath it. One thing you might want to look at though is the bass response. If you have floor standers then raising them may take a little off the bottom-end response, *unless* you can provide some type of front baffle that goes from the floor to the bottom of the speaker cabinet...that recouples the bass to the floor. Even stand-mounted monitors can benefit from that idea, preserving low-end response that would otherwise be wasted. The material be anything that's relatively rigid, even cardboard, so you can use any sort of wood or tile or whatever that has suitable appearance - as long as there is no air gap along the front of the whole of the speaker cabinet from the woofers down to the floor. With my floorstanders i wound up making a pair of stands (with flat fronts) about 7" high and that smoothed the upper mids out for without decoupling the bass. Regards. John

It depends on the speaker of course, but I found some butcher blocks that fit under my Silverline Preludes perfectly (2 blocks per side) and painted 'em flat black. Raised them to exactly my ear level (added maybe 4 inches) and since the Preludes have smooth treble they sound amazing. I am anti-coupling (I admit it freely) and use vibrapods directly under each speaker and little rubber feet under and between the blocks so they stay put (on a wood floor with a rug in front of the speakers).

Thanks for the additional comments. This is very helpful.

"I've read that optimum results occur when the tweeter is level with the ear"

This is hardly true with every speaker, depends on the design and the xover. The last two speakers I have owned had the tweeter positioned several inches above ear level. There is no hard and fast rule on this one.

Shakey