In the past months, I have struggled to find the right placement for these open baffle speakers in my living room. I always felt that something was not quite right and that the placement was not optimal. It has been really frustrating!
At last, after moving some furniture around to free up more space around my speakers, I have found what I consider to be an optimal placement. It is striking how small differences in speaker placement can have such a large impact on perceived sound quality. Once you get it "right", everything falls into place: instruments are accurate in their tone, attack and decay, soundstage is wide with accurate instrument placement as well. The sound is "full", yet detailed. Sound is "natural".
Here's a sketch of my living room, with an approximate placement of my speakers:
I tried placing the speakers facing the length of the room (along the wall on the left), but could not get good results. The furniture got in the way, and perhaps the differences in depths of the wall gave poor results.
The speakers (in red) are facing my couch, forming a quasi-equilateral triangle with the listening point. I have two thick square GIK acoustic panels that I place on top of my couch, just behind my head, and while they do not affect the frequency response much, listening is a little more relaxing (for my 56 year old years) with them.
I took some measurements. Here is the SPL with 1/24 and psychoacoustic smoothing:
Obviously, there are some refelections and room modes causing a few dips here and there, but nothing serious. This is, after all, a living room, not a recording studio!
Bass extends down to 40hz, which is fine by me, and the response is pretty darn flat up to 20kHz. Above 10k, the response is highly dependent on the height and distance of the ears to the speakers, probably as a result of the line array topology.
I will detail all this in my blog, and post some additional videos in the coming days.
