I've seen people spend ten thousand dollars on a pair of speakers and then plop them against the wall next to the TV.
It makes me cringe.
Placement interacts with everything simultaneously: room modes, boundary reinforcement, first-reflection timing, SBIR — all of it shifts the moment you move a cabinet three inches. And most of us, once we've landed on something that sounds good, stop experimenting.
That's a mistake.
The wall behind your speakers isn't just a surface — it's a second source. Every woofer is radiating rearward energy that combines with the direct sound at your ears. The phase relationship between those two arrivals depends entirely on distance. Pull the speakers too close and you get upper bass fill that sounds warm at first and stuffy on extended listening. Two to three feet from the back wall is a reasonable starting point, but the destination is where your room's modal energy stops fighting your speakers and starts working with them.
On toe-in, my personal starting point is straight ahead with as little toe-in as possible — and it works beautifully if your speakers have a flat off-axis response, like our Aspens. Conventional wisdom pushes people toward aggressive toe-in, but that's a compensation for speakers that beam. A well-designed wide-dispersion speaker rewards you with a bigger sweet spot, more natural imaging, and a soundstage that breathes when you let it look straight ahead.
The recording has the depth information. Your room either lets it through or it doesn't.
Which is why, after all these years, I'm still moving speakers.
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