Low frequencies accumulate where walls meet.
Room corners are bass magnets. Low-frequency waves reflect off walls and pile up where boundaries intersect, creating areas of excessive bass energy. This is why corners often sound boomy and muddy—there's simply too much low-end information concentrated in too small a space. Understanding this changes how you think about both speaker placement and room treatment.
When bass waves reflect off walls, they can either reinforce or cancel each other depending on the wavelength and the distances involved. In corners, where three room boundaries meet, you get maximum reinforcement. This is both a problem and an opportunity. It's a problem if your speakers are shoved into corners, exciting these modes. It's an opportunity if you need to place bass traps or subwoofers where they'll have maximum effect.
This is why pulling speakers away from corners almost always improves bass definition. You're reducing the boundary reinforcement that causes bloat and boom. The bass becomes tighter, faster, more articulate. You lose some absolute output, but you gain everything that matters—clarity, pitch definition, musical timing.
If you need to tame excessive bass, corners are where to start. A tall bass trap in each corner can dramatically smooth out low-frequency response. Even something as simple as stacking thick blankets or moving a bookshelf into the corner can help. The goal isn't to eliminate bass—it's to prevent it from accumulating in ways that obscure the music.
Bass corners teach us that placement and treatment work together to solve acoustic problems.
