Front speaker distance and imaging

If it works....

... who are we to argue. I too keep my fronts aimed forward (more side reflection) but I haven't set any distance as precisely.

Speaker placement, room treatments and etc. will have a lot more affect on the sound you hear than what a new receiver will do.

Toe-in is a good thing.


It might be a good starting point. Speaker positioning is never exact because rooms are never exact. Neither are your preferences.



I'm not sure that we can pick up all of our ideas about regular listening rooms from very large rooms. But, toe-in is a good idea.


It is amazing how audible even small changes to loudspeaker position and/or listening position can be in some rooms.

As someone else pointed out quite correctly, changes in speaker position can easily be far larger than something you might think was a biggie, like changing to a new receiver.

If you get bored with the sound of your system, re-orienting and/or moving speakers around can be a big help.

Everyone is right, your room determines a lot. Having said that - I have tried almost every speaker-placement configuration there is and the best I've worked with is toe-in. What I do is establish an intersecting point about a foot behind the center listening spot (a foot behind my head). All 5 speakers are aimed there - simple as that. Granted, the 2 surrounds are 3 feet above ear level, the 2 mains are at ear-level, and center is angled down to the listener. I have a long narrow rectangular room so this helps in avoiding reflections. Pretending that I didn't have any walls to worry about I might still use this setup. Having all speakers fire in the same place creates the superb imaging on axis. Even if you're sitting slight to the left or right, your ears will still recognize the imaging, only a little bit to the side. I find that the sound is tight and well-balanced like this.

I find that speakers facing straight forward might be more ideal for a much larger room with a wider listening area. Different speakers different layouts. My experience with straight-forward is that the imaging sometimes collapses to whichever speaker you're sitting most in-line with, but then again you get a wider soundstage which can be more immersive. It's a tradeoff, but i've found the best balance is with what I described above.

As for your comments about movie theaters. No they usually don't toe-in speakers. Then again the speakers used in theaters I can only assume have a way of evenly dispersing sound so that you might get the same effect sitting in the center as you would a little off-axis. Just my thoughts.

+1 for me. I was having a lot of imaging problems until I tried this. Things are must better now. Thanks for posting this.

You want to toe-in the front speakers to reduce side-wall reflection intensity which will confuse imaging. If they're too hot in the treble on-axis you can toe them in beyond where they point at the listener.


The usual starting point is with an equilateral triangle. There's no good reason to have the speakers even with the display since this leads to reflections off it. There are good reasons to move the speakers closer, notably to reduce the relative level of front-wall reflections, delay the reflections, push the first SBIR null out of the main speaker's pass-band, and to increase the level of the speakers relative to the reverberant field.

The greater of 4' and half the distance to the listener are good starting points for speaker to front wall spacing.

Are horns still prevelant in theaters?

A lot of newer designs implement waveguides over the dome tweeters, thereby widening the sweet spot.
If yours have them, you still could try toe in.
If side wall reflections are a problem, you can use absorbers.

Hmm. That's a speaker angle of 71* degrees. 60 degrees (equilateral triangle) comes up a lot for stereo speaker setup. 71 degrees doesn't ring a bell. Maybe somebody got their trig. wrong? (hope it wasn't me!)

- Terry