[Jax]

It's been a few months since I followed some tips from acoustic consultants for determining how to place your monitors in your room and yourself in the listening position. The results have been very favorable, enough so that I thought more people should know these tips.

If possible, try placing your monitors according to the following equation -

The distance from the center of the woofer face to the side wall is:

Room Width times .276 (RW x .276)

The distance from the center of the woofer face to the wall behind the speaker is:

Room Width times .447 (RW x .447)


For my control room, it didn't make sense to place the monitors as far away from the wall behind the speaker as the above equation would have them. In that case, I just put them where they fit into the following rule, called the "Golden Mean Ratio":

The monitoring position with the least destructive frequency relationships (phase-cancelled direct and reflected sounds) is at a distance of 38% from the wall behind the monitors.

I found that the biggest improvement happened when I setup my monitors according to the side wall equation. The center sounds much less cluttered and more defined, and the width of the stereo image increased. Listening from within the GMR improved seemed to improve the way I heard the balance of frequencies across a broad range, most notably in the low frequencies.

Try it, slutz! What have you got to lose? IMExp, the differences between monitors placed where they "seem to sound best" versus using these equations and the GMR has been pronounced, all for the better!

I'd like to know if this works well for anyone else. Lemme know!


p.s. - In some cases, your room may be too wide for the frequency dispersion characterisitics of our monitors. But the GMR will still be in effect no matter what the size of your room.