Speaker Placement: Instantly Improve The Sound From Your Speakers

There’s so much hype around what speakers to get, what microphones to get, what plugins to get, all of which takes a decent chunk out of your wallet. While these things can affect your sound, you need to make sure you have a good foundation first: good speaker placement. Without this, you’ll be chasing your tail long before you realize.

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Speaker Placement: Why?

The best analogy I can come up for this is trying to figure out what color an object is, with heavily purple tinted glasses on. How are you supposed to know what color that object is with that much purple filtering?

The same thing can be said for what’s coming out of your speakers. How are you supposed to know what the sound should sound like if what you’re hearing is so colored? For the most part, you don’t even know what color!

Sure, you can rely on what other pro songs sound like and try to match the sound, but then you’re just making blind changes. With speakers so colored, it’s hard to notice some things that need fixed up!

This is why it’s so important to find the best placement for your speakers to give you the most true and even sound. Before placing any treatment on the walls, make sure you have the optimal speaker placement first!

Speaker Placement: Where?

As mentioned in a previous article, bass builds up in the corners of the room. The absolute worst thing you can do is have your setup against the wall in the corner. Try to move your setup as far away from the corners as possible and a foot or three away from the wall. This will reduce reflections, while also making the reflections more evenly distributed from the low to high end frequencies.

If you have the option to face your speakers down the long end of the room, do so! You’ll want the wall behind you as far away as possible, because the sound will just bounce right back. The back wall is a great choice for acoustic treatment once you’ve treated the first reflections and corners for bass response first!

The next thing you’ll want to do is isolate your speakers from the table. This not only brings the speakers to a good height to be even with your ears, but it reduces the amount of resonance the speakers are causing on the table. This can throw off the sound of your speakers much more than you think! You can use books, tabletop speaker stands, or isolate them completely with separate stands, not even connected to the table.

You’ll want to make sure nothing is sitting in front of and on top of your speakers. The items on top will resonate, causing unwanted ringing in some cases, and in most cases throw off the frequency response (how you perceive the sound coming from the speaker). For items in front, it will cause reflections that can cause the sound to sound weird, and possibly dramatically change how the speakers sound because only a portion of the sound is actually getting to your ears first.

Lastly, you’ll want to position the speakers so that they make an equilateral triangle between you and each of your speakers (the distance to each speaker is the same, and the distance from each speaker is the same to that). If this isn’t possible, the next best thing is to create an isosceles triangle, a triangle with only 2 equidistant sides (your ears to each speaker). The closer you can get to an equilateral triangle, the better.

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Once you address your speaker placement you should hear a dramatic difference in the sound, depending on where they were before. If you were in the corner beforehand, you should notice that your speakers sound brighter, but also the low end is much tighter/more defined. If you happened to be one of these people who had their setup in the corner, let me know if you can hear the difference and what you can hear!

Have a good one!

-Michael