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Comment by tiniuclx | Hacker News Reader

This is a really important article if you want to get the most out of your speakers or studio monitors. When I was working on my home studio, I found that the position of the monitors had a huge impact on how they sounded.

It took a good few days of moving the monitors & measuring the response, but I believe I was able to find a position that is usable & makes up for some of the deficiencies of my room.

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Same goes for hifi to be honest. I didn't spend that long fiddling with speaker position, because I just don't have that many degrees of freedom in my living room without rearranging the whole room around the speakers[0], but after two or three hours spread over a couple of days or so I did get to what I think is the best compromise in terms of sound quality vs. the speakers being in the way. A few weeks later I added a subwoofer into the setup and, again, probably spent another 3 or 4 hours spread over several days fiddling and listening to get that to sound the best I could at my typical listening volumes (what I wanted was to support the low end without overwhelming it).

I haven't even got to the room that I use as an office/studio, which is a small spare bedroom. The room works well as an office now that I've redecorated it and put in new floor and shelves, but I need to finish off power routing and suchlike before I start on speaker placement.

[0] Many serious audiophiles would argue that you should do just this for the best results but I don't have the space and I want a room that's usable for things other than just listening to music. I often think this is one of those situations where the perfect really can end up as the enemy of the good.

Haha, I think your [0] is pretty much the common case for most who care for good sound. I had that setup once (35m² dorm room with a bed, a couch+small table, cloths rack and a desk - and two 1,40m/4.5ft speakers in the middle of the room). Yes: There is a VERY good point to arranging the room around the speakers. But that's difficult to explain to an SO who doesn't care for good sound and/or who prefers a more multi-functional living room.

If you're listening alone, and don't care for a small sweet spot: In our study room I'm VERY happy using a DIY FAST/WAW system with a large full range speaker. The 4" FR (Tangband W4-2142) has some heavy beaming at higher frequencies. The sweet spot is rather small (I put it in front of my main display) - but reflections are a non-issue. The result is a very good sound stage. I implemented the cross over into a DSP (Beocreate Amp) and have one channel for each of the two drivers per side. But the only "real" correction I apply is at the low end (less room modes & extension to 40Hz at expense of ~9dB less SPL_max. Pretty nice for 4l encased volume and two 4" drivers).

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