Owned 3.3 many years ago. If I remember correctly the listener distance was 1.5x the loudspeaker separation.
NHT Placement Help
I am a long standing NHT customer, and find there geometry line (1,5, 2.5, 2.9, 3.3) to be an outstanding value. I am in the design phase of a Home Theater. In the past I use 2.9 speakers and an AudioCenter2 as my front three channels. They were about 8' apart, and I sat 8' away from them (Equilateral method). GREAT two channel sound.
My new theater will have the speakers 11' apart from each other AND I am planning to upgrade to the 3.3 speakers to better fill a larger theater room (Same AudioCenter2).
My question is "How far do you sit from your 3.3 or 2.9 speakers? Do you find position changes soundstage a little or a TON?
NHT would recommend a listening distance of nearly 16' from the speaker, which is impossible in my design.
I'm curious as to your thoughts.
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The NHT Recommendation is 1.5x(Speaker to Speaker) from the front of the speakers. Due to the room/use, they will be about 11' apart, so I will have to be back by 15.5' from the front of the speakers, which puts me in the 2nd row of seats. I am curious if others have experimented with a closer distance and the results. I need to go find Ken Kantor, and make sure I do this right! |
I think the most critical distance or measurement is that the 2.5's .. 2.9's and 3.3's ( which I have ) must be placed at 3 inches from the back wall In this placement the side firing woofers on those models create a corner with the back wall and are aided in bass reinforcement ... NHT has taken this placement into consideration and adjusted the crossover so the top to bottom balance is correct with no frequencies sticking out if you correctly place the speaker 3 inches from the wall behind them If you pull any of those speakers into the room 2 to 5 feet as you might do with a normal speaker ... they lose the bass coupling and reinforcement that NHT designed into them and become thin and rather bright sounding because of the lack of bass I suspect your 11 foot speaker spread is to accommodate a very large screen and that you wish to place the left and right speaker at the outer edges of the screen My space is a bit smaller and to maintain the dimensions where I like to place the speaker and seating placement in my room ... I've set up my 3.3's and seating at 1.25 with no ill effects or losses I like to keep my tweeters and mids about 20 to 25% off the wall behind them and my seating at 25 to 30% off the wall behind the listening position ... this places both the speakers and seating position to be in the least excited and effected room modes Your 11 foot speaker spread and 15.5 seating distance creates an Isosceles triangle with the two sides being equal and longer than the base spread of 11 feet You could try going back to a equilateral triangle set up with all sides being 11 feet then the height from the base to the seating position would be 9.52 feet You can juggle the numbers around with this easy to use calculator ... http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/geometry-plane/triangles-equilateral.php With sides "a" .. "b" .. and "c" all being equal in a equilateral triangle ... plug in your 11 foot dimension into "a" and you will see that the height from the base to the seating position ... "h" is equal to 9.52 feet Now this is pure speculation on my part but an equilateral triangle set up may put you more in a "Near Field" location and that a spread of 1.5 may place you in a "Far Field " location ... but again that is "pure speculation" on my part
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