Monitor placement in relation to walls

[snoopy23]

I know there is an ovarabundant wealth of information out there, but I want some practical input. I have a piar of Mackie MR-8's. How far from the walls should they be in order to breathe the full audio spectrum fully? Right now my station and monitors are pulled about 8" from the back wall, but I am unsure if this is enough room. Should I treat the wall directly behind the monitors with anything? Also, IYHO would I be better off setting up my mixing station across a corner (making a triangle), or parallel to the walls? The room is treated, approx. 11'x17', and has a 14' peaked ceiling. Thanks for your input!

[calaverasgrandes]

ooh good one!
I did mobile sound system installs (setting up a PA at various clubs and outdoor events) for about ten years so I feel I have a little insight on acoustics. I had to suss the sound of a room by looking at it and then set up a couple mains, sun and monitors. Not a lot of time for moving stuff around!

Traditionally folks set up in the middle of a room shooting across the short axis. The reasoning seems to be that this give you a good representtation of stereo image and lessens the distance of any slap back echo from the rear wall. So it wont be a very obvious slap back.
I find that this works in an ideal situation where you have a medium to large control room and plenty of space between you and the speakers.
For a lot of us though, we are working in smaller spaces. So setting up in this fashion might be a waste of space, especially if the tracking and mixing room are the same room!
I like to set up in the corner myself. This is not fashionable but it has its advantages. When the speakers are in the corner you get a quarter space reinforcement of the bass frequencies. This is good if you are using small bass challenged speakers but can be awful if you are using large bassy speakers! When speakers are positioned in the classic equilateral triangle in a corner they will not be even close to bouncing off of the walls in a square room. This means dont line up the back of the speaker parallel to the wall but aim the front of the speaker so that it is toed out a bit. About 5-10 degrees is good. The other neat part is that the energy coming off the monitors will not encounter any flat surface which are exactly 180 degrees or 90 degrees from the speaker, so its not bouncing back exactly at you but it is bouncing around the room at varying angles, keeping it more diffused.
What I think matters most though is that you should set up in the corner, in the middle, or an end in such a way that it is balanced acoustically. I even arrange my gear in kind of a mirror fashion so that the reflections off of the gear are the same on both sides.
I also will spend a little time with just an ipod plugged into my monitors and move them around the room to find out where it sounds awful and where it sounds good. Then I start hooking up the computer, patchbay, etc!

[JWL]

You can see our strategy for room setup here:
http://realtraps.com/art_room-setup.htm

Just as important to the speaker positioning is the listener position. The 2 speakers and the listener should be in an equilateral triangle, in most instances. See above for more detail.

If your speakers are close to a wall boundary, I recommend putting a bass trap between the speaker and the wall.

[dsw]

18 inches from the wall at least.

treat back wall with absorption and/or bass trapping.

equilateral triangle between your head and the speaks.

tweeter same height as yer ears.

toe in a little as stated before.

kill corners with bass traps.

most amateur setups have the speakers too far apart or too close together, gives you poor imaging.

use stands that are very dense and isolate/de-couple the speakers from the stands.

fill your stands with sand if they can be filled.

use spikes on the base of the stand.

[T-rex]

you mention too close or two far apart, what is a good distance? I have always read an equalateral triangle, but it seems every studio has vastly different distances between the speakers based on the console etc.

[calaverasgrandes]

I kind of left a couple things out. When I said set up in a balanced fashion what i was intending to communicate is that if the left half of the room (in relation to the speakers) is very dead and the right half very live this will screw with your head when you try and mix.
Also, I meant to say toe in when I said toe out in the previous post.
Just imagine that the pseakers are lasers and you wnat them to converge on teh same spot, with an equal distance between you and the speakers. So if you are 3 feet away, the speakers should be 3 feet apart. If you are 4 feet away ,they should be 4 feet apart. Hence equilateral triangle.

I think it is also important to be reasonable with room treatment. I have been in places that had so much damn room treatment you couldnt hear anything right! I think it is better to plan your acoustics than to just throw money at it.

[fuzz]

Its my understanding that its best to set the monitors along the long wall (the 17' in your case) to minimize side reflections. This gives you a depth of just 11' wall to wall. At that point you'll want to position your ears 1/3rd into the room (from the wall w/ your monitors). So depending on the physical size of the monitors, they may be pretty close to the wall. I just had a chat after running into Hugh Pool over at Excello and he brought up the impotance of treating the wall behind the monitors, but in our case the rear of the monitors face the glass window so there's not much to be done. However, I don't notice very much bounce from the front.

There's a million ways to skin a cat, but your dimensions are close to ours (22'X11', 10' high) and we do fine with cedar shingle on 1/4" lauan on the back wall for diffusion, 2" 703 overhead clouds (6'X4" over the mix position), and some bass trapping in the corners. I think our speakers are 12" off the front wall. Just one way to do it, hope another perspective helps.

[JWL]

Regarding the setup on the long wall vs. the short wall, there are many opinions out there. I have always preferred setting up the speakers firing into the longest part of the room, mostly because the rear wall (ie, the walls the speakers are facing) will do the most damage to your sound, so you want to make it as far from your ears as possible.

Side wall reflection points are easily treated with broadband absorption.

[jgimbel]

Regarding the setup on the long wall vs. the short wall, there are many opinions out there. I have always preferred setting up the speakers firing into the longest part of the room, mostly because the rear wall (ie, the walls the speakers are facing) will do the most damage to your sound, so you want to make it as far from your ears as possible.

Side wall reflection points are easily treated with broadband absorption.

When I first got my setup as is I posted here about that, and that's the advice I got (probably from JWL in fact!). I tried it both ways, and I definitely like it this way better, for exactly that reason. The wall behind your head will make a much bigger difference in the sound if it's right behind you, versus if your side walls are closer (plus you can treat them easier as the majority of the sound isn't generally being aimed directly at them).

[calaverasgrandes]

this is why I like the corner placement. After you deal with the bass hump from the 1/4 space reinforcement, the rest of the walls are entirely not coupling with your speakers in the mid to high range.
If I was setting up "square" in a room I would align the panels on the adjacent walls so that they aimed reflect sound away from the listener.
EG the left speaker is going to be aimied generally towards the right wall. So I would oreint the panel on that wall so that the speaker was aimed dead at the middle, and the angle of the panel should direct the energy that isnt absorbed towards the back of the room.
It's easier to draw than it is to say.