It’s one of the most common setup questions I get: “How much toe-in should I use?”
Most speaker manuals will tell you to angle the speakers in until they’re pointing just behind your head, or sometimes directly at your ears. That can work. But it’s not the goal. It’s compensation.
Toe-in is a hack. A way to narrow dispersion, boost upper midrange and treble energy in your listening position, and tighten up the image. But you only need toe-in if your speakers fall apart off-axis.
If the frequency response isn’t consistent as you move off to the sides, you lose tonal balance and spatial precision. Imaging smears. The stage narrows. So you toe them in. You aim that narrow sweet spot right at your head and hope everything snaps into place. And sometimes it does.
But that’s a Band-Aid.
With the Aspen speakers, for example, toe-in isn’t required. In fact, we prefer you don’t. You can point them straight ahead, parallel with the back wall, and still get a wide, locked-in center image and a huge, open soundstage. That’s only possible because of their flat on- and off-axis response—especially in the critical mid and top octaves (to be practical I often use 1 to 2˚ of toe in).
The planar midrange and tweeter don’t beam. They spread evenly, without the ragged dips and peaks you get from many cone-and-dome designs at angles. That evenness means you hear the same tonal character and phase relationships whether you’re on-axis or a little off. The illusion holds. The speakers disappear. The room fills.
So if you’re working with speakers that demand careful toe-in just to sound coherent, it’s worth asking why. It might be a design limitation. Or it might just be that they weren’t voiced for a room like yours.
Try this: point your speakers straight ahead and listen. If the center image collapses or the stage shrinks, it’s telling you something about dispersion. If it holds—and even opens up—you’re hearing good design.
Toe-in isn’t wrong. But it shouldn’t be a crutch. With the right speaker, in the right room, it turns out you don’t need it.
You just need the truth to hold up at every angle.
