Location, Location, Location!
Dear Gary: I recently had an interesting experience at a friend’s house that really underscores the importance of watching those details! My friend had purchased the Rotel HT receiver to go with his B&W/DefTech speakers. He asked me if I wouldn’t mind calibrating the system’s audio for him (the picture was calibrated by an ISF tech). We live in Brooklyn, New York, so space is always at a premium. My friend was a little concerned about pulling the front L/R channels too far from the back wall. His center channel is on top of his TV and cannot be moved. I explained to him the importance of keeping the speakers equidistant from the listening position, but it did not work. I was especially worried about the acoustics of the room, since his room is very lively and I feared some details would get lost in all those reverberations. That was a few months ago. Over that time we watched quite a few movies and I was able to get him into tweaking his system in ways that made real improvements: component isolation, power conditioning and quality cables. However, he kept reading reviews by you guys about 3D holosonics and grew increasingly frustrated with what he thought was lackluster sound. I made my move. I explained that most of his problems were due to speaker placement. I explained to him how differences of an inch can make a huge difference when the sound finally reaches your ears! Well, he no longer cared about the decor as much and dared me to prove it. Here’s what I did. Using just a tape measure and about an hour of his time, I aligned the speakers. The center channel (immovable) is 133.5-inches from the prime listening position. I made sure that his L/R front channels were also exactly 133.5-inches from the listening position. I then made sure that the speakers were equidistant from the center channel, 49.5-inches from tweeter to tweeter. We then recalibrated using the test tone generator. After rechecking all linear and SPL measurements, we went back to our test DVD— the opening scene from Strange Days. What a difference! The center channel sounded more focused, even though we didn’t move it. The sound stage widened tremendously and panning effects were much more dramatic. Also ironic was the fact that the rear channels now sounded much more distinct—panning in Godzilla was outrageous fun! The lesson learned by my friend is this: Speaker placement is CRITICAL. Even if your processor allegedly compensates for the distance, keeping everything physically equidistant is good acoustics and can make any theatre more coherent and a hell of a lot more fun. It’s work, but well worth it. Please keep up the good work your magazine is doing to educate us in the best ways to improve our home theatres!
Ben Asaro, Brooklyn, New York,
Editor Gary Reber Comments:
It’s nice to hear that people are applying our recommendations and discovering "the best that it can be" results. I hope you were able to position the surround speakers each relative to the sweetspot at 133.5-inch on that equidistant arc as well. 480p Image Conversion To 720p
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