Speaker Positioning

Well, yes and no.  Some here say it is not possible, but set up 50+ pair of Magneplaners in every possible customer room you can think of and you learn a few things.

With Maggies, placement is EVERYTHING!  So, you learn by trial and error and experience where they need to be and even, in some rooms, how there is no place where they will be at their optimal placement.

Keep trying until you get the sound as close to what you heard at the concert hall in your room. For Maggies, this typically involves making some changes to the surfaces in the room--adding traps, changing curtains, etc.  Depends upon what you will "settle" for, I guess.  

I have been lucky enough to have had customers with excellent rooms who purchased the right hardware to bring Maggies to their finest possible sound, which, if you ever have a chance to hear, is so awesome you will swear off box speakers forever.  It ain't cheap, and it ain't especially easy however!

With boxes, just keep moving them around.  Do you have the newer "tall" boxes? (Gee, wonder where they got THAT idea??)  If so, you have a shot at getting it right as far as they go, anyway.

Best of luck, and Cheers!

Richard

Ask your wife.

millercarbon6,538 posts11-15-2020 3:30am

Exact measurements become irrelevant when you don't have a bilaterally symetrical room.

 
What? Since when? Exact measurements become irrelevant when you are deaf in one ear. As long as you have two working ears its the distance between them and the speakers that determines imaging. That's why we have two ears. Two eyes, depth perception. Two ears, localization. If you can't localize the predator then guess what? Hey, you! Out of the gene pool!

Localization occurs both from timing, relative volume, and spectral content which is related to timing and volume.  In the present embodiment of stereo with loudspeakers, timing information is often not well communicated due to lack of shading of the ear from the opposite speaker.

Then we get into the recording, which assuming a stereo recording, may contain only level differences, or level and timing differences depending on the microphone arrangement.  Of course, often what we are listening to was recorded monaural and then placed stereo during processing.

So yes, that poster was mostly right in saying that exact measurement becomes irrelevant when you don't have a symmetrical room. You can't address timing and ignore volume or vice versa.

Most of these 1/3 rules, 1/5 rules, etc. are nothing more than avoidance of room nodes.  It's 2020, we don't have to use simple rules any more.  They don't account well for room size, aesthetics, etc.   When you have simple online tools like amroc, it does not make sense to use "rules" or rudimentary calculators.

https://amcoustics.com/tools/amroc

I would suggest taking into account the frequency response of your mains and where they are placed.


@sj00884, what you are asking is possible, you can get that from impulse responses with reflections.

Here is the Cardas calculator that’s mentioned.
http://www.cardas.com/room_setup_calculators.php

Not ideal for a living space since you will be placing speakers out in the room. Naturally, your ears will tell you what sounds best, but it does give you a good starting point. Getting speakers 4-6’ out allows your speaker to sound its best.

The laser exact measurement doesn't mean anything for some industry vets who go by ear, and will have speakers positioned uneven due to gear channel imbalance. Setting them up like focusing  binoculars to "lock" a balanced sound can leave one speaker pushed forward of the other. Looks odd, but if you're going for sound, that's what it takes. I've participated in moving speakers/subs and heard the results.

My personal system/ears follow the Cardas guide.