If you have ever purchased a pair of loudspeakers and read the accompanying manual, you have likely encountered misguided advice with regards to speaker placement. The trouble with these manuals is that they approach speaker placement as a one-size-fits-all scenario. Loudspeaker manuals will commonly tell you to place your monitors a fixed distance from your front wall to avoid "unwanted reflections." The trouble with this advice is that the sound reproduced by your loudspeakers (based on their placement) is left to chance. This is not a great approach for accurate sound reproduction. We, however, recommend using a combination of measurements as well as your ear to optimize your speaker placement. For a solid introduction to speaker placement and its related concepts, have a look through the following Sonic Scoop article here.

Image courtesy of www.sonicscoop.com.

One challenge we run into in our home theater designs is providing clients with the seating they need without sacrificing audio quality. While we understand the need for additional seating to accommodate guests, we recommend designing your theater around the most frequently used, and most important seats, rather than the edge cases. We recently completed a project for Mr. Sahni, an audio-video enthusiast from St. Louis, MO. For this project, we designed the speaker layout around the front row seats. While the rear speakers had to be slightly elevated for clear lines of sight, the bar height is low enough so that the angle between the rear speakers and final row of top speakers is not too compressed. While the sound quality for the second row of seats will be somewhat compromised, the sound quality at the main seating position has been preserved as well as possible. You can read more about Mr. Sahni's project and the design challenges it posed here.