Speaker Set Up

Audiophiles rage on this debate till all hours on the Internet. Let’s go!

Room Treatment

Yep. Number one, if you don’t treat your walls with some absorbing materials, the sound will bounce around like a gymnasium. I’m not intending to get into esoteric and expensive solutions here. Those certainly abound. I’m recommending you at least PAY ATTENTION to the problem and deal with it in some fashion. My solution is reasonable.

Zorbers $250 Per Pair

Most rooms need three pairs of Zorbers. (Outie is 69 x 45, Innie is 66 x 43).

Put one Zorber behind each speaker.
Put one Zorber on each side wall half way between you and the speakers. FIRST REFLECTION.
Put two Zorbers behind you.

The math says… if you measure the square footage of your drywall surfaces, you should dampen 20-25% of it. My experience says three sets of Zorbers for $750 total usually does the job.

If Zorbers don’t look cool enough for your taste, find something (curtains/art) that will be equally absorbing. The coefficient of Zorbers is 67 NRC. The panels are two inches thick.

Using Zorbers, or velvet drapes (which will cost many thousands by the way) will slow down the slap echo. You want to hear the speakers, not the REFLECTION OF the speakers.

Seating

Put your chair or couch approximately two thirds, to three quarters, away from the front wall. If your room is 20 feet long, we want your chair roughly 5-6 feet off the back wall. If your room is small, sit a BIT off the back wall. Try not to hug it. Now you’ll know where to place the FIRST REFLECTION Zorbers.

Speaker Placement

We want them SOME off the wall behind them. If the nose of your speaker is three to six feet off the back wall, that’s a nice start. This helps give you a chance to hear the sound from the speaker itself, vs REFLECTED sound.

Spacing

Set your system up in a triangle. Start by having the left speaker aim at your left ear and right speaker aim at your right ear DO… actually get the tape measure out and be sure your left and right speakers are the SAME distance from you and each other (center to center). It will help your imaging.

Bass Balance

If you follow the above guidelines, you’ll have a certain amount of bass. Is it too much? Too little? Just right? It matters on which speakers you have and what your taste is. It picks up as you get closer to the back wall. Or buy some…

GoldenEar Powered Towers

You might just consider the GoldenEar powered towers. All of these models have built in subwoofers with their own amplifiers. This makes DIALING IN the speaker easy. You can adjust the power amp control on the rear of each speaker to what YOU LIKE. Maybe you’ll like it at noon.
Maybe 11 o’clock. Maybe 1 o’clock. The choice is YOURS. Further, it can be quickly changed depending on the source you’ve chosen. A well recorded jazz trio will have robust bass. A live rock album from the 70s is likely to have very little bass.

If you read even a handful of speaker reviews carefully, you’ll recognize CODE for, these speakers are very fussy. They didn’t image well until we diddled and maneuvered until the cows came home. GoldenEars are the opposite of fussy.

The consistency of GoldenEar drivers is rock solid. All GoldenEar ribbon tweeters, mids and powered sub drivers are created to a precise standard. You can be confident of great imaging.

When companies buy drivers from vendors and screw them into a cabinet, the consistency is wildly varied. So OF COURSE the speakers will sound different if they’re wiggled even a few inches this way or that. They’ll never cast the large contiguous image that we get from GoldenEar- without even trying!