The $100,000 System That Sounded Terrible

Walk the halls of any high-end audio show and you will find rooms built for one purpose: to demonstrate the absolute pinnacle of audio reproduction. Exotic speakers. Massive monoblocks. Turntables that cost more than a luxury car. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment in a single room.

I have walked into a great many of those rooms over five decades in this industry. And I can't count how many of them sounded absolutely terrible. Not mediocre. Unlistenable.

The culprit is almost never the gear. It's the setup.

Here's the encouraging half of that story. I have also heard modest systems, assembled on reasonable budgets, that create genuine magic. Systems that make you forget the equipment entirely and connect you straight to the music. The difference between the two is setup, pure and simple.

Which means the largest single upgrade available to most systems is already sitting in the room, and it doesn't cost anything but a Saturday.

In Vol. 1, we found the best seat in your room by walking a bass line back and forth until the notes evened out. Now let's place the speakers.

Give Your Speakers Room to Breathe

If you want your speakers to disappear, they need distance from the wall behind them. I call that the front wall, and the space in front of it is where your imaginary musicians are going to stand.

Four feet is a good minimum. Don't go farther than one-third the length of the room. Somewhere in that range is your starting point, not your final answer, and we'll adjust it later.

This one change is the difference between a soundstage that lives behind your speakers and one that stays pinned to the cabinets.

Form a Right Triangle

Your left speaker, your right speaker, and your listening seat should roughly form a right triangle.

Here's a workable starting point: separate the speakers by about ten feet, tweeter to tweeter, then put your seat about eight feet back from them. Slightly less than the distance between the speakers is my rule of thumb, so scale it to your room if ten feet isn't realistic.

Getting that proportion close matters more than getting any single measurement exact.

Clear Out the Space Between Them

One of the worst things you can do is put a large object between your left and right speakers. Equipment racks, fireplaces, and furniture all sit directly where the three-dimensional image is supposed to appear.

If your room gives you no choice, keep whatever sits between them as low to the floor as possible. A couple of power amplifiers on the floor between the speakers is fine. A tall rack stacked with electronics is not.

Ideally your electronics live off to the side, where they're convenient to reach anyway. That usually means running longer interconnects and shorter speaker cables, which is my preference regardless.

Aim Them at Your Shoulders

Sit in your seat and have someone angle the speakers inward, roughly ten to twenty degrees off center. We call this toe-in. Aim the right speaker at about the outside edge of your right shoulder, and the left speaker at the outside edge of your left shoulder.

I prefer less toe-in than most people do, so start conservative. You'll fine-tune this later once the image is up and running, and small changes here make surprisingly large differences.

Check Phase Before You Judge Anything

Before you evaluate a single note, confirm your speakers are wired in phase. The red positive terminal on your power amplifier goes to the positive terminal on your speaker, and the negative to the negative, on both channels.

Get this wrong and nothing else you do will matter. The bass thins out, the center image refuses to lock in, and you'll spend an afternoon chasing a problem that takes thirty seconds to fix.

It's the cheapest performance upgrade in audio, and I've found a surprising number of systems with it backwards.

Use Tape, Not Guesswork

Find the center of your room and run a strip of removable blue painter's tape down its length. That line is your reference for everything that follows.

Mark where the speakers go. Mark where the seat goes. Mark the spot you liked before you moved anything, so you can always get back to it.

Setup is a series of small comparisons, and comparisons only work when you can return to where you started. Your memory for sound is far shorter than you think it is. Tape isn't.

Block Off a Saturday

Doing this properly takes a good Saturday afternoon. If you can spare the whole day, take it.

You'll want a tape measure, a roll of easily removable painter's tape, a small handheld mirror, and if at all possible, a second set of hands. Music with a wide range of bass notes played over and over will serve you better than a favorite album, because you're listening for evenness, not enjoyment.

What you really need is patience, attention to detail, and a willingness to experiment.

What This Costs You

Nothing except time and effort.

Every adjustment in this article is free, reversible, and available to you this weekend.

I have watched systems go from merely good to absolutely magical on setup alone. I have watched skeptics turn into believers the moment they heard what their existing equipment was capable of all along.

The most expensive system in the room is not the one that sounds best. The one that sounds best is the one somebody took the time to set up.