Speaker Placement

Nice post Rekiwi, so far your answer is the best to your own question. Real good points, I tend to agree in that there are so many variables that I can't imagine a formula giving an end result. Room shape, room contents, types of walls, ceilings, floors and speaker design concept should give the experienced audionut a starting point. My personal philosophy is start speakers as far apart and as far from all walls as possible with 10 ft left between sitting position and speakers. Not easy if you don't have a large room. Then about 3 inches of movement and listen - it can be painstaking. I also believe some toe in is almost always required on most designs to put some additional solid body on image outlines. Otherwise, you have wide a soundstage with less specificity of singers, instruments, etc. Also on my system I lose a little of the transparency without toe in, ie, I can locate sound coming from the speakers rather than behind the plane. A good test is a CD or LP with background singers to really judge where in the soundstage you want them and how far forward or back, also bunched together or more spread out. Toe-in usually affects that. Also, good point about distance of your chair, the further back the more room interaction, closer and it can sound like your on the front row at a rock show. But the big rule of thumb for me is use 2 or 3 sources of music, find your optimal position and then don't move em anymore. Some music is in phase some isn't, even on the same CD and you will gain or loss the perceived magic you just spent all of your hard work on with different sources. And finally, it's all about personal preference. Unfortunately some people can never be satisfied and get swept away into the music - always looking for something. And it may not be there!

Redkiwi, you refere to the female vocalist with "This is what I call too much body and not enough outline." I think I call that fat! Where as alot of well placed female body is always welcome. (there now you can call this post RHUBARB, and you can thank me later!)

JD, I think it is indeed possible to have too much female body in certain circumstances, but like you, if I read you right, I don't like to be short-changed either.

Pops, I often do it the other way around (that downunder thing), in that I often start too close to the wall and move it out listening for how the soundstage opens up and takes the correct shape, but looking for the point at which the voice starts to "fall apart" in terms of its palpability or body.

Stereophile had an excellent article on speaker placement that was written by Jonathan Scull in one his installments of fine tunes. I believe it was the October or August issue of 1998. I've probably gotten the date wrong (i'm at work) but you can probably find it on their web site. The article provided a very uniform way to set up speakers in rectangular rooms and I have found it to be unfailingly useful.

Pops, does your son really need a closet? Aren't his clothes on the floor, anyway? It's impossible to overstate the importance of re-positioning the speakers when making any change to the system. My recent switch from an active to a passive pre-amp caused the image to congest in the center. I got rid of the toe-in that had worked just fine and now, with the speakers facing forward, the image is just right. The need for change was also true, to a lesser extent, when going from the stock power cord on the CDP to Kevperro's Asylum cord. For apartment dwellers like myself witht the typical long, narrow (12x30) LR-DR, I've found that, whatever the speaker position in relation to the walls, it seems better to sit farther away. As I moved back and forth on a wheeled ottoman (no, that's not a gun-toting resident of Constantinople), I was able to find a distance that just "clicked", about 11 feet away from the front plane of the speakers. BTW, transmission line 2-ways.