Emma
Member
A bedroom setup post caught my attention because the numbers in it are the ones people agonise over for no good reason. Roughly ten and a half feet back from the speakers, the pair about nine feet apart, and the question is whether the room needs rearranging to widen that spacing because somebody said the triangle has to be equal sided.
It does not. An equal sided triangle puts about sixty degrees between the speakers from where you sit. Nine feet apart at ten and a half feet back comes out closer to forty five, so slightly narrow, and narrow usually reads as a tighter and more centred image rather than a broken one. That is a taste question, not a fault.
The hallway is the part I would actually worry about. What wrecks a stereo image in an awkward room is asymmetry: one speaker with a wall a foot away, the other opening into a corridor. The two channels then arrive carrying different early reflections and the centre drifts toward the deader side. You cannot make that room symmetrical, but you can even up the first reflection points a bit and pull both speakers off the front wall by the same distance instead of tucking one in.
Cheap experiments before moving furniture: toe them in until the axes cross just behind your head, then try firing them straight ahead, and listen to something with a solid centre vocal both ways. If the singer sits in the middle of your skull either way, you are finished. If they slide toward the hallway side, that is the reflection talking and not the spacing.
What did the rest of you do in rooms with one open side? Absorption at the reflection point, or accept it and aim off centre?
It does not. An equal sided triangle puts about sixty degrees between the speakers from where you sit. Nine feet apart at ten and a half feet back comes out closer to forty five, so slightly narrow, and narrow usually reads as a tighter and more centred image rather than a broken one. That is a taste question, not a fault.
The hallway is the part I would actually worry about. What wrecks a stereo image in an awkward room is asymmetry: one speaker with a wall a foot away, the other opening into a corridor. The two channels then arrive carrying different early reflections and the centre drifts toward the deader side. You cannot make that room symmetrical, but you can even up the first reflection points a bit and pull both speakers off the front wall by the same distance instead of tucking one in.
Cheap experiments before moving furniture: toe them in until the axes cross just behind your head, then try firing them straight ahead, and listen to something with a solid centre vocal both ways. If the singer sits in the middle of your skull either way, you are finished. If they slide toward the hallway side, that is the reflection talking and not the spacing.
What did the rest of you do in rooms with one open side? Absorption at the reflection point, or accept it and aim off centre?
