5 Tips for Positioning Your Speakers In Your Room

Setting up your speakers in your room may feel like a difficult task, but we've laid out a few simple steps to follow to help you get the best out of your speakers. 

1. Distance to the wall behind the speaker (rear wall)
2. Distance from the side walls
3. Distance between the speakers
4. Distance from the speakers to the listening position
5. Toe-in (angling of the speakers towards the listening position)

Symmetry is ideal (so having the speakers equal distances from the rear and side walls for example), but in the event this is not possible - experiment.

You can definitely achieve great sound performance even if the environment and room layout is not ‘perfect.’

Below is an example of our recommendations from the R Series manual:

1. Distance from the rear wall

Here, we’re dealing with bass. Low frequencies will wrap around your speaker, bounce off the rear wall, and combine with the sound going forward. This can be a good thing, as you’re effecively using the room to give you some free bass output, but can very quickly muddy up your sound and become very boomy. 

We recommend having your speakers at least 225mm (9 in.) from the rear wall (measured from the back of the speaker). To really dial in the position, it’s best to listen to either your favorite tracks with good, varied bass frequencies, or you could even use a suite of test tones. It’s about striking the balance between having good bass output, bass detail and balance with the rest of the track.

If you are struggling for that minimum distance, or are finding things a little bit tricky (bass can be tricky), our ported loudspeakers do come with port bungs. These can be tuned by having or removing the centre portion of the bung. This is so you can either totally close up the bass port, reducing the bass provided by the speaker the most, or partially block the port which gives less of a reduction. But remember - that rear wall reflection is still happening, so even though you’re limiting the bass output of the speaker itself, the room will add bass back in. Think of it as compensation.

2. Distance from the side walls

Proximity to the side walls will also affect bass output in the same way as the rear wall, but also the midrange. We recommend giving the speakers room to breathe here, with a minimum of 50cm for most of our speakers. 

In addition, going too far from the wall may mean that the sound from the first reflection point travels a longer path, losing lots of energy, and taking too long to reach you ears, which will affect imaging and also result in a blurred, indistinct sound.

3. Distance between the speakers

Stereo imaging simply does not work when the two speakers are right next to each other. So they need distance between them. We recommend between 1.5-3m. This will obviously be down to your room width, and needs to work in conjunction with your distance from the side walls. The wider the distance, the wider the soundstage.

4. Distance from the speakers to the listening position

In an ideal world, your listening position will be at the midpoint between the speakers, and the distance from the speakers will be between 1-1.2x the distance between the speakers. As you move further away than this, your soundstage width may seem to narrow somewhat, whereas going too close might produce a ‘dead’ spot’ in the middle of your soundstage. 

5. Toe-in

Uni-Q means that toe-in is not necessary like it can be with many other loudspeakers. We would always recommend starting with the speakers facing flat into the room. If your side walls aren’t symmetrical in their construction in a drastic way, then maybe some slight toe-in could help with the mismatch by focussing a slightly louder direct sound to the listening position, but you shouldn’t need to go further than 10 degrees.

Having the Uni-Q flat into the room also maximises the sweet spot, giving maximal coverage into the room, so more people share the same experience.