Try different seating heights

Don't forget to listen at different seating heights and or speaker tilt back (which achieves the same thing).

If you have the ability to experiment with different seating heights or tilting the speaker forward or backwars, do so. Sometimes raising or lowering your listening position slightly can produce a more neutral and more alive sound.

There are generally two or three reasons why this may be true for your system.

First, it's not uncommon for standing waves to affect your sound vertically.  

Note that if you do plan to change the listening position's height, be sure that it's standing waves you're hearing and not different time arrival and related crossover/phase relationships from the drivers!

A way to check that aspect is to slightly tilt the speaker backward or forward to see if what you're hearing is predominantly an audible effect from the relationship of the speaker's vertical height/angle to the listening seat.

You should do this anyway, whether or not you change your seat height.  With planar speakers, it's equally important.  That's because, apart from standing waves, there's another issue to be considered called "beaming" which has to do with the tweeter.

There's usually a quite obvious 'best' speaker elevation for speakers on stands.  Going by the manufacturer's recommended stand height is only a good starting point.  That's because the manufacturer has no idea what your exact listening height (seat height plus your body height) will be.

About the only speakers where this might not need to be considered would be any concentric array (separate tweeter located within the bass/mid's voice coil, ala KEF and some others).  We've found that it's rare you'll be at the correct height for just about any speaker - on a stand or not - concentric drivers or not.

The only other speaker design where it may not be as noticeable is when the tweeters are beside the mids (horizontal relationship vs. vertical).  But that one is a whole 'nother topic... And side-by-side line arrays for tweeters and mids may need to be tilted to find their optimum angle, just as planars.  Seat height may be critical here as well.

Since we only have a narrow range of adjustment that we can make vertically, it's nice to at least know what is possible, if you so desire to address it.

Consider finding the right height and then building a platform (if necessary) to raise your sofa or chair height to the perfect position.

Please, do remember to try speaker tilt before trying seat height!  It's not uncommon for both to make an improvement.

The reason why the effect may be noticeable enough for you to have a preference is that 'floor bounce' may be introducing a cancellation at some point.  The slight movement simply shifts the frequency slightly so that you may prefer (or dislike) the sound at a different seating heights.

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