While I’m without a turntable, I thought it might be fun to talk about speaker placement in less than ideal circumstances.
Many of us dream of having a perfect, dedicated sound room or, at least, a rectangular room that allows some opportunity for proper speaker placement.
Unfortunately, the reality for those of us who live in apartments (myself) or small houses is having to make do with multi-use spaces and rooms that are not symmetrical.
In our apartment, the listening area is located on the main floor. The large open concept main floor consists of a living area with a bay window that is off to one side of the room and a kitchen.
The main room is divided in two with an area rug providing the rough boundaries of the listening area and everything behind my listening chair designated as kitchen space.
This not only makes for a relatively small listening area but also introduces two potential problems: an irregular and inconsistent wall behind my speakers; and a large open area behind my listening chair that is nearly the same size as the listening area.
Complicating matters further is the presence of two staircases along the west long wall of the main floor (one up to the second floor and the other down to the outside door) with a wall separating the staircases from the rest of the room.
Given the parameters of the room and the acoustic challenges imposed by the space, I’ll never have an ideal listening room at my current apartment.
Nevertheless, I remain committed do the best I can under the circumstances. For me and my space, that is to obtain and settle on an optimal nearfield listening setup.
The basic idea of nearfield listening is that your listening chair is equidistant from the speakers and that speakers are equidistant from each other. In other words, if you were to draw an imaginary line between your speakers and your speakers and the listening position you’d have an equilateral triangle.
Once you have the nearfield setup roughly in place, it is important to listen with your ears and make final adjustments based on what you hear.
In my case, I needed to toe in my speakers to the point where I’m looking more or less directly at the baffle of each speaker and I can only just barely see the inner sides in order to achieve a relatively deep and wide soundstage that is properly centred and focused.
Ultimately, the combination of a nearfield setup and subsequent adjustment by ear has allowed me to compensate for the limitations of an asymmetrical, multi-use room where space is at a premium.
If you’re facing similar challenges and having similar issues, a nearfield listening setup might be worth a try.
An important footnote to add is that in an ideal, square room, the speakers would have an identical angle towards the “listening chair”. In our situation however, the speaker on the right hand side of the above photo needed a slightly different angle due to the bay window behind it.
The odd angles of the walls behind the speaker cause the sound to reflect in ways that resulted in the sound seeming to come mostly from the left-hand speaker. By making slight adjustments to the angle of the right-hand speaker, we found our way to the sound seeming to come from directly in front of the listener. This is the ultimate goal for any speaker setup – it should sound like the music/speaker/singer is straight ahead.