how far do you sit from your speakers?

What's ideal depends upon the specific room and the speaker make/model and can only be determined by expermentation. Jim Smith's book "Get Better Sound" has an excellent procedure for doing this.

The procedure explained in the book worked well for me. I was pleasently surprised by the result.

As I lay back the chair, or keep it upright, the presentation alters. Noticeably.

Not surprising - when you get close to a wall there is significant variation in sound quality reaching your ears. It is especially noticeable in the bass.

The other effect of reclining is your own ears - unless your pinna is able to rotate like a dog would do (cock an ear and turn it toward the sound)

I think it has a lot to do with the type of music I prefer, room size, speaker size and maker as to where the speakers sound best. I mostly listen to jazz, blues and rock so my speaker placement is more immediate with an open sound stage that has more width than depth. If I listen more to classical, big band and or parade type music I think I would want a much deeper and wider sound stage because of the size and scale of the music and the complexity is much more involved.

I can also turn my bass cabinet forward or backwards and again for the type of music I listen to I have them forward.

My room size taking away the record rack along the back wall is 19D X 14'7"W X 8'H. I sit 3' from the back wall and 11' from my speaker. The speaker are 2' 8" from the side wall, 4'5" from the back wall and they are 9' apart at the tweeter. I toe them in quite a bit.

I'd agree that it really depends on the room and system and personal preferences.

Kind of like Lincoln's answer to the query, "how long should a man's legs be?" Lincoln's reply: "Long enough to reach the ground."

I sit about 1 tot 2 feet from the wall about 8 feet from my speakers. My Speakers are about 8 feet apart. This is the maximum I can reach in my room. My listening room is also my living room. The whole room is about 13 feet wide and about 22feet long. Not ideal but Dutch house tend to be (a lot) smaller then houses in the US. I have have furniture between my speakers. I hop to do something about that though.

My ideal would be speaker about 8 feet apart listening position about 10feet from the tweeters. But I all depends on the speaker room and most importantly the all mighty WAF.