Front speaker placement help . . . with pictures!!! (1 Viewer)

[Sean Laughter]

As the title says, I need a little advice on placing the front speakers. The speakers are some older JBL Northridge series bookshelf speakers and the Northridge Center - got them in the old NSP1 combo thing.

In any case, for reference here's how the rear is set up right now:

That's about as low as they're going to go, shouldn't be too bad though.

Now, here's the front (with the speakers in no particular arrangement obviously since one speaker is missing and the receiver isn't even down there yet):

Now, the first plan was to mount the left and right on the wall at a level that would place the left speaker below the light switch on the lower side of the screen. The right would obviously be at the same lower level on the right - basically a few inches from the bottom of the screen. The center would be on a shelf mounted just below the screen. This gets the tweeters of the L/R speakers even with ears seated in the couch that will go down there.

My only concern with this is that this places the right speaker extremely close to the right wall. Will this greatly impact the acoustics (mainly for movies, not doing alot, if any, of serious music listening down there)? The only two options I can think of to rectify the situation are:

A) Mount all three speakers under the screen, center in center, left and right below the screen on the left and right. The tweeters of all the speakers are now in line, but none of them are at exactly ear level.

B) Shrink the screen dimensions to get the right speaker pulled away from the wall. This is easy enough to do as the screen is just a piece of Parklands Plastic cut to size.

In any case, I'd be grateful for any advice. If the right speaker being that close to the wall won't matter I won't worry about it, that really was my primary concern with the setup, but if someone can see any other major pitfalls that'd be good too. Thanks guys!

 

[mackie]

Ideally the speakers shouldn't be placed on a wall or against one(back or side). If possible, put the speakers on stands of some type and move them forward. If you can't get the tweeters to ear level, aim them upwards so they are pointed to ear level.

 

[Sean Laughter]

Thanks mackie, one suggestion I got at AVS was to use some stands I already have and try my A) option and if that doesn't sound good maybe go with B). Using the stands to just try out different positions seems like the best way to go. May still end up shrinking the screen somewhat, but I'll have to wait and see how everything sounds when hooked up.

 

[mackie]

Sounds like good advice.

If you have to mount speakers on a wall, then I'd look for ones with speaker boundary compensation switch(or something similar) or a speaker that was designed to mount on a wall.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

How far back is your seating distance? A smaller screen will let you sit closer and allow for more toe in which will help somewhat with that side wall. Using the stands is a great idea though to see just what's what in your room.

 

[chuckg]

You might try some sound-absorbing material on the right wall to help reduce the reflection there. Just try some carpet stuck in place with blue-tack or the like for experimenting.

 

[Sean Laughter]

Seating distance is going to be about 12 feet I think. Putting something on the wall is kind of a no go - it's not my room so I'm abiding by some guidelines, hehe.

I guess I will just have to play around with the seating. The only issue with using the stands is finding somewhere to put the subwoofer other than the corner in which it's sitting in the photo - since the stand would be in the way there. I don't really feel like having an RCA cable running the entire length of the wall. We'll see. Thanks for the advice everyone.