'L' Shaped Listening Rooms. What works?

Bluenose: There are a couple of items to address. One is simply close off the two rooms with a wall, including a french door would be a nice touch. This would solve most of the problem. If you really don't want to do that, is you may need to get a more powerful amp in which you are trying to fill more space with sound. Also add area rugs to the kithen floor, and hangings on the wall for absorbsion. Otherwise you will get alot of boucing sound waves from the hard surfaces in the kitchen area. Also what is your budget? This could make alot of difference. I hope this helped a little bit. Good Luck.

Moving.

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