HEIGHT AND ANGLE
Firstly, the most important thing to consider for your monitors is height and angle. Whatever your space and setup, your monitors should be at ear height relative to you. This helps your ears receive more of the direct sound from your monitors, resulting in a richer and more detailed listening experience. This same principle applies to the angle of your monitors.
If you’re not positioning your monitors towards your ears, some of the sounds you’ll be hearing will be reflections from some of the other surfaces in your studio. Walls, ceilings, desks, floors, keyboards, and even windows will reflect sound to at least some extent. This is an inevitable effect of the sound’s behaviour when in an enclosed space, and should be considered in any room.
WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
The main issue with reflections is that the signal you’ll be hearing is a combination of the direct sound and reflections from various surfaces. This combined sound gives you a less accurate picture of what’s going on, making it harder to mix. As such, getting your studio monitors to the right position for your ears is the first thing you can do to help combat this.
speaker Placement and Geometry
Studio monitors sound their best when listened to on-axis, so it is also important to ensure the monitors point directly at, actually slightly behind, your head. High frequencies are more directional than lower frequencies so you may not hear the high frequencies accurately if you are listening to speakers pointing too far off-axis. This may differ for a particular speaker, but in general, we want the speakers to point directly towards our ears—and we want to minimize the high frequencies that bounce off the side walls. As for height, ideally, the tweeters should be at the same height as your ears when you are seated, typically about 47-55 inches (120-140 cm) from the floor. Speakers can be placed slightly higher and tilted down towards you if you need to clear the top of your computer monitor. Tilting speakers is a precarious way to set up the monitors and care must be taken to avoid the speakers toppling over.
Can You Place Speakers Against the Wall?
Try to place your monitors either almost against the front wall or at least 43 inches (110cm) away from the front wall. If your speakers are placed close to the front wall, their bass response will be exaggerated by up to 6dB. For this reason, many monitors provide onboard EQ settings such as whole-space (flat EQ for placement away from any walls), half-space (slight bass reduction for placement near the front wall), and quarter-space (increased bass reduction for placement near front corners). Many monitors also provide additional EQ options, which can further tailor the speakers’ sound to compensate for deficiencies in the listening environment. Keeping symmetry in mind, the left and right speakers should ideally be equidistant from their respective side walls.
If your speakers have a rear port, just keep the speakers away from the wall at least the same distance as the diameter of the port, usually about 5 to 10 centimeters. Speakers placed with their front surface more than 15 inches (38 cm) and less than 44 inches (110 cm) from the front wall run the risk of creating uneven bass response due to low-frequency reflections from the front wall. Similarly, try to place your speakers at least 44 inches from their nearest side wall. If your speakers must be placed near a side wall or a corner, try the quarter-space EQ setting on the speaker to mitigate any extra bass build-up. You will, of course, need some acoustic treatment on the front and side walls, so leave at least a few inches for that. For a more thorough look at speakers/wall interactions, check out the links at the end of this article.
Speaker placement should be either close to the front wall, or more than 44 inches (110 cm) away from the front wall, as shown here. Locating the speaker in-between will cause speaker-boundary-interference (SBIR) that can cause low-frequency cancellations. (For more info on SBIR, see link at the bottom of this article)
Positioning your head inside the triangle ensures a natural stereo “sweet spot” that lets you move around a bit and even have a collaborator sit next to you.
Noted acoustician Carl Tatz recommends nearfield speakers be spaced 67.5 inches (171.5 cm) apart, but even he agrees that this is only a starting point. Most recording consoles are about 48 inches (122 cm) deep, so for speakers sitting on the console’s meter-bridge, this setup creates an equilateral triangle with its focal point just behind the mixer’s head. This geometry produces a natural stereo image and sound will seem to exist in the room, rather than coming directly from the speakers themselves. If you have a small desk, speaker stands will help position the speakers to create the optimum geometry. If your room forces you to sit closer to your front wall, you can simply move the monitors closer together to achieve something close to an equilateral triangle. If your speakers are physically large, a larger triangle will probably make sense, and vice versa.