You’ve likely taken great care with speaker setup. Toe-in appears dialed. Distances seem locked in. The image probably floats where it should. But when you lean forward, something changes. Stand up, and the treble leans out. Slouch, and the midrange softens. It may have seemed like a quirk of dispersion—just off-axis voicing.
But some speakers don’t just narrow vertically. They lobe. And you might be sitting in the quiet space between the beams.
What to Do
Check your seat height relative to the tweeter—or, more precisely, the acoustic center between tweeter and midrange. If your speakers use higher-order crossovers (especially 3rd or 4th order), vertical response becomes more complex. Try raising or lowering your chair slightly. A folded blanket under you. A half-inch pad under the rear speaker foot. Even tilting the speaker a degree forward or back can shift the wavefront into alignment.
Don’t assume the spec sheet knows where your ears should be. Let your ears tell you where the lobe lands.
Here’s Why That Works
Higher-order crossovers often yield superb frequency integration—on one axis. But above or below that plane, the overlapping phase from adjacent drivers can cancel, creating vertical nulls. You won’t hear it as a dropout. You’ll hear it as a subtle thinning. A lack of immediacy. A voice that seems to float near the surface but never quite steps forward.
Move your ears out of that cancellation zone, and something tends to snap into place. The vocal doesn’t just get louder—it feels located. Cymbals gain air without edge. Midrange tones stop shifting and start settling.
Sometimes the final tweak isn’t about toe-in or triangle. It’s about angle—vertical, not horizontal. Because presence doesn’t just happen in front of you. It lands at your ears. And that’s where the music comes alive.
