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Speaker Placement - When it's perfect!

So many audiophiles have commented that when your room treatment is completed, your electronics set up and tweaked and most importantly, your speakers are set up in your listening space correctly that you'll know it because everything just sounds so "right" and natural.  I just accomplished that feat in the last two weeks.  I say two weeks because I needed to play a wide variety of recordings to be sure that I'm there.  It is so great to have finally hit just the right set up.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that it has taken me well over a year of experimentation to get to this point.  It's not that other placements yielded poor quality sound its just that now everything sounds like a live event (as much as any of our systems can).

I would really appreciate hearing about your journey to the promised land of audiophile/music lover bliss.  How long did it take, what were the most difficult aspects of the journey?  And if you have yet to get there, what do  you think is the "brick in your wall"?
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twoleftears's avatar
twoleftears
5,318 posts
 

I don't remember the name of the guy (German? Austrian?), but he has videos on youtube.

Basically, his method is this: hook up just one speaker, and position it exactly where you will be *sitting*, right in front of your chair or move the chair and position it exactly where your ears will be.  Play some music with some good bass.  Get down on your hands and knees, and crawl around the approximate area where you're planning to situate one of the speakers.  Perhaps do a grid search.  Find the exact position where you can hear most bass.  Mark.  Repeat, crawling around the other speaker position.  Set everything up and enjoy.

On the face of it, this sounds intuitively right.  What do people think?

(And you get a little exercise!)

geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 

twoleftears wrote,

"I don’t remember the name of the guy (German? Austrian?), but he has videos on youtube.

Basically, his method is this: hook up just one speaker, and position it exactly where you will be *sitting*, right in front of your chair or move the chair and position it exactly where your ears will be. Play some music with some good bass. Get down on your hands and knees, and crawl around the approximate area where you’re planning to situate one of the speakers. Perhaps do a grid search. Find the exact position where you can hear most bass. Mark. Repeat, crawling around the other speaker position. Set everything up and enjoy.

On the face of it, this sounds intuitively right. What do people think?

(And you get a little exercise!)"

>>>The XLO speaker placement track will give the best results. Better than that method. Better than any trial and error approach. Optimizing one parameter (bass) ignores the other parameters such as frequency response (smoothness), coherence, soundstage depth and dynamics. Thus, you wind up with good bass at the expense of everything else, no? The XLO Track insures ALL audio parameters are optimized simultaneously. AND it does so regardless of room dimensions, room acoustic devices or lack thereof, etc. That’s why I frequently say that trying to find the ideal - the very best - locations by ear is a fool’s errand 😜 as one can never be sure he's found the very best locations. Plus once you change something in the room the locations you found are no longer valid anyway. Trial and error methods are like trying to solve X simultaneous equations in X + n unknowns. 😝

toddverrone's avatar
toddverrone
840 posts
 
Well, the plant may not be a good bass absorber, but the giant pot it's in, full of wet soil and placed in a corner is probably where I'm getting the bass absorption. Or super strong expectation bias. 😁

I have my measurements and they show a significant drop in bass decay time on a waterfall plot. And I have my ears.
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geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
+1 toddverrone. At least we know it's not the tree or the plant or the flower. 😄 That gives me an idea for a new tweak. 😬

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