LiquidBlue
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Ultimately, the important thing is whether it sounds good to you in your room. There are always constraints you may have to work with and I’m not saying this formula is the end all be all. There are many other factors to consider, like distance to the back wall and side walls, speaker height and rake angle, different speakers may have different requirements to sound good and different rooms are going to have different needs to get great sound.
To clarify, the formula he gave was to divide the distance between tweeters by the distance from ear to tweeter, so your seating distance is actually the larger number to get to 83%. This seemed to work really well for me. Due to room constraints, I have to set up on the long wall. My speakers are pulled out where the tweeter to back wall is 40”. This was as far out as I could pull them and maintain decent bass. As they’re along the long wall, they’re not close to the side walls, so that helps reduce side wall reflections. The tweeters are 95” apart and distance from my ear to tweeter is 114”. So 95/114=83.3%. My speakers are slightly toed in, so when I use the laser measure, the tweeter is pointed 1ft outside of each shoulder. This is what works well for me with my current speakers in my room to get the sound characteristics I prefer. Your preferences may be different and other factors may be very different as well, so what works for me may not for you. But the 83% formula aligned with my many hours of fiddling with speaker placement, without having that knowledge prior. So maybe there’s something to it? I recently got new speakers and after a good amount of break in I began playing around with speaker placement again, to get the sound and imaging I wanted. During break in they were fairly close to where the old ones were, but when I started moving them around, I did so without preconceptions and based it on how the speakers interacted with my room. They are close, but not in the exact same position as the old speakers in the room and after measuring as outlined above, the numbers worked again, when I found the spot that sounded best. Actually I was close when it started sounding how I wanted, but I tweeked an inch here and there with the speakers and got to 83% and it seemed to lock in again. Bass is good and highs are detailed and not harsh. The center image is locked in and soundstage is big both in width and depth. I get a nice 3D presentation with great imaging. Then I worked on getting the sub dialed in to fill in on the bottom a bit.
I got through a little bit of his book and find there’s a lot of great info there. I’m sure there are other guides to getting great sound and different methods, but other than buying the book, it doesn’t cost anything to play around and may really make big improvements. Sean, sorry to spin you up again, but give it a try and see what you think. Don’t forget the blue painters tape to mark where you started, so when you find I've screwed you up more you can always get back to square one!! 😁
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