5 Tips for Home Audio Speaker Positioning
If you want to set up the perfect home audio system, one of the keys to getting the best sound is proper speaker positioning. While the quality of speakers is one important aspect, you won’t be able to get the most from your system unless you take certain steps to determine the most ideal setup.
Here are some tips to help you successfully install an audio system that produces the best possible sound quality.
1. Avoid Corners
One of the best ways to get better sound from your speakers is to keep them away from corners. If your speakers are in corners, sound won’t be able to travel across the room as effectively, particularly if they’re positioned too close to furniture. For instance, a rear speaker placed behind a sofa in the corner will result in somewhat muffled sound if sound can’t travel.
2. Keep Speakers Away from Walls
This ties into avoiding corners. While you may need to place your speakers near walls, it’s best to keep them at least two feet away from the front wall as well as the side wall. However, this won’t apply to on-wall or in-wall speakers. If a speaker is too close to a wall without any built-in installation, this will result in raised lower frequencies without any predictability or linearity.
The general rule to follow is the rule of thirds and fifths when determining speaker placement. Place speakers away from walls at a total distance of a third or fifth of the space’s dimension in that particular direction. For instance, if you’re installing speakers in a room that’s 15 feet wide and 20 feet long, you would place the right and left front speakers four feet—or one-fifth—from the front wall and three feet out from the right and left side walls. Then you would place the main listening area four feet from the back wall, or eight feet from the front.
Of course, you can play around with the placement to see which positions produce the best sound.
3. Use the “Golden Triangle” Configuration
Another way to properly position your speakers is to use the “golden triangle,” which entails placing the speakers at a distance from each other that’s similar to the distance between both speakers and the listener. They can be somewhat closer together, but it’s important to keep your speakers farther apart than the distance between you and either speakers. If you’re seated too close to either speaker, it won’t allow for proper imaging, which means your audio system’s soundstage and stereo effects will be inaccurate.
You should see a clear difference when you use this configuration to position your front speakers.
4. Center the Listening Area
Another important step is to make sure that the listening area is centered to the speakers. It may be impossible to perfectly position seating in the middle in some spaces, but it’s ideal to arrange the room so that the listener experiences more accurate and enveloping stereo imaging. High-quality speakers may not fail to create great sound if their positioning is slightly off, but you’ll ultimately be able to get better sound with centralization in mind.
5. Calibrate Your Subwoofers
It’s important to make sure you don’t forget about the subwoofer, which is another vital component of a complete sound system. Proper placement of the subwoofer can mean the difference between enhancing and diminishing your audio system’s sound quality. This is because the bass is capable of disrupting any of the frequencies in a movie or music mix.
Subwoofers release particularly long waveforms at frequencies at 80Hz or less. For comparison, a 1kHz tone will produce a wavelength of about 13 inches, while a 40Hz tone’s waveform will measure at around 28 feet. These longer waves can subsequently cause more issues with peaks as they collide with each other when hitting obstacles and bouncing back into the space. This means you’ll want to make sure your subwoofer is in the right spot to maximize reach.
The fact is that there isn’t a difference between how a subwoofer sounds from its placement to the listener and how it sounds from the listener to the sub’s placement. For example, if you place a subwoofer on the floor and sit on the sofa, and then switch the positions of both you and the sub, the sound will be the same.
To get the best sound from your subwoofer, try the technique of “crawling for bass” and take the following steps:
- 1. Place the subwoofer on the seating that will serve as your listening area, sitting it on a box to reach listening level, if possible.
- 2. Use an RCA cable that can reach from the AV receiver’s output to the subwoofer.
- 3. Play a track with a lot of bass, which will often be a track with more instrumentation, and turn up the volume until you can actually hear the subwoofer. (75-80 dB is often the ideal level.)
- 4. Crawl around in areas where you would place the subwoofer and find which location offers the best sound quality. The best location for this will be around the couch and away from the center of the soundstage.
- 5. Choose a location where the bass is equalized yet defined.
Taking all of these steps can help make sure your money is well-spent when installing a new home audio system, maximizing the sound quality of your speakers and subwoofers, whether setting up a 2-channel system or a larger surround sound home theater.
