'L' Shaped Listening Rooms. What works?

Disregard my sarcastic and unhelpful (well, not really) suggestion above. Rather, if you check www.newformresearch.com you will find that speaker designer John Meyer has several room placement models, including the dreaded 'L' shaped section that you are saddled with. And if you have trouble, he can send you a chart...he is such a helpful gentleman who also happens to build fabulous speakers. (I previously owned the RS2 8x30's)

Spend $50 and get CARA, the room acoustic modeling software (Do a search here on Agon for more info). I have been playing with it for a couple of weeks, and it has REALLY helped me with speaker placement in my odd shaped room. Although my previous, tweaked by ear and aesthetics, location was pretty good, CARA helped me find locations that sound even better. I would have never tried this position because of the blatant assymetry and weird angles, but it sounds a TON better and I don't need to use my balance control to compensate.

Be warned, the calculations take so long that you will have to use it for a rough idea and then further tweaking by ear. To get a rough position in my room took about 14 hours of 100% processor time on a 1GHz system. A complete optimization would take about 20 years!

Try Cara. It's a room modeling program that can accomodate irregular rooms and it did great for me.
http://www.cara.de/ENU/index.html

Here's another vote for CARA. I moved into an L-shaped room a little over a month ago and this software let me play with more options than several months of moving furniture around would have. Model the room well and the output is surprisingly accurate. It's a lot less physically taxing, too.

To speed up processing time try dropping the "Maximum Reflection Order" down to 4. This is done under "Options" -> "Parameter" -> "Maximum Reflection Order". Time to run 300 iterations (the suggested max) will go from overnight to 15-30 minutes. Comparisons have shown that for doing numerous "what ifs" the results are good enough. Don't drop below 4 as that essentially defeats a useable frequency response result.

This same menu also has a pair of radio buttons labeled "Real" and "Complex". Set it to "Complex" to take into consideration any acoustic treatments in the room.

I'm close to adding to the review that here on Audiogon, BTW, so be on the lookout for that. I've found some interesting things about this software in the last few weeks.

With due respect to the speaker placement programs, the fact remains that you will still have your "L" shaped room that sucks. If you can not change the room, how about a good set of phones and leave the speakers for background listening. One other note, when I still had an "L" room, I had the best results with two-way mini monitors taking bass out of the equation. Good Luck.