Speaker Placement - When it's perfect!

kosst_amojan   Thanks for the description of your listening space.  It's a big area, but as you said quite asymmetrical.  It must have taken quite a lot of effort not to mention patience to get your system to sound right.  As I mentioned in my  original post I tried many of the formulas for speaker placement and none of them got me to THE spot.

@stevizzy Is it audiophile nervosa that keeps you finding a new perfect spot or do things change in your system that provokes you to continue moving the speakers. I'm not throwing stones here believe me.  Getting just the right set-up that locks the sound in for you is not usually an easy process.  Lots of experimentation!  Good luck finding that spot where everything locks in.

Anyone who has ever played around with room treatments, you know, like Tube Trap, Echo Tunes, Skyline diffusers, Helmholtz resonators, tiny little bowl resonators, Mpingo discs, crystals, things of that nature knows that it takes a while to locate the ideal locations for any of those things. Compound that with the speaker location issue and you have an almost never ending search for the absolute best location for everything. As new acoustic thingies are added the while cycle of experimentation begins anew. That’s why, if you’re really serious about this, you should be using the XLO Test CD speaker placement track every time you change something in the room. You want the guy’s voice on the Test CD to "sound like it’s coming at you from all around the room." That’s when the system will be most diffuse, since the track is an out of phase track. Then, when the system is IN PHASE the stereo image and sound will be optimum. Make sense?

Of course, everything is relative. Initially you might not hear much with the out of phase track but as you get better at it and the system gets more accurate, the impression that the sound is completely non-directional, coming at you from no particular direction, will become more and more obvious. So, not only must speakers be set up to within a inch of the exact location where the sound is the best but all the various room acoustics devices must be precisely placed too. 😳

I have noticed that as I drain the resonant bowl next to my right hand the image tends to deepen and the bloom comes off the rose and floats right over Diana Krall Head....

IMO, how can you get the best out of your equipment unless you have a perfect tuned room, which IMO, is a dedicated audio room with the right dimensions and with room treatments. Living rooms or rooms that have openings on 1 side and not the other, bookshelves on 1 side wall and let’s say glass on the opposite, or other non-dedicated rooms with no control of reflections, how would you ever get symmetry to get good SQ? I have built 2 custom homes in the last 15 years with dedicated audio rooms in each. Each room uses Multiple dedicated outlets, has just 1 chair, and still use multiple room treatments.