Square Room Placement

The least desirable listening environment is a square room. Due to similar ratios of boundary distances, larger sound waves in the lower midrange and bass regions will have a loading effect and cause tonal imbalance in sound reproduction. If you are misfortunate enough to have this type of room, there are ways to minimize these effects. The first way is to create a diagonal listening environment where each speaker is along a wall boundary firing diagonally in to the center listening chair. If this is not practical for your home environment, then use either of the two different mathematical systems as seen in the diagram below.

 

We offer two different types for experimentation to discover what sounds best to your ears.

  

 

Golden Progression

 

A = 0.276 x W

B = 0.447 x W

 

 

Rule of Thirds

 

A = 0.333 x B

B = 0.333 x L

 

 

In either case, once you have your speakers placed, the goal is to position your listening chair in order to form an equilateral triangle with the loudspeakers.

 

All of the scenarios offered are simply starting points and assume an ideal situation where furniture placement does not play a factor in your system set up. If you find that you can not place the speakers well in to the room, just be sure that you follow the ratios of rear and side wall placement, where distance A is proportional to distance B. In some situations this may result in a much wider distance between the speakers. In this case you could make the listening triangle larger or if that is not possible, then you would need to toe in the loudspeakers more dramatically to achieve a strong center image. Of course if the distance between the speakers becomes too extreme, you could always reverse distance A and distance B in order to maintain the same ratio of side wall and rear wall placement.