You need to experiment, too close and you loose separation, too far apart and you get a hole in the middle.
What you do is put both monitors on a plank, slide them far apart and listen, slide them closer togther until it sounds better. Stop, slide them a little further part and repeat using the same music. It helps no end if you have someone else do the moving of the speakers as you can keep listening.

Not my idea, it's from Mike Stavrou of Mixing With Your Mind fame.
When I heard him demo this technique at a conference it was one of the few times I've actually heard such a dramatic difference in sound, that it happens just by moving the speakers makes it all the more amazing.
In general most video guys have their monitors too far apart according to Mike.

Bob.

I think mine are too high. About 2' above my lugholes, 100degs separation at about 3' to centre in front of me

(plan view
Mon1<======== 4'6"==========>Mon2
^
.
.
. 3'
.
.
v
+++++++++++++ME++++++++++++

Though it all Sounds good.

I just think they are too high? OR, could be pointed down a wee bit?

Cheers Gents

- g

Hi, Nick's placement is about right, the 60 degree placement is about perfect, i.e monitors spaced in a triangle where your head is at 60 degrees and each speaker is at 60 degrees too. Tweeters definitely at ear height. If you lay your speakers on their sides, have both tweeters into the center. Angle the speakers towards you. There are some good separation test tracks for stereo imaging on the web. Hope this helps.

Anthony

agree with nick's placement - though coming from pro studio's it's important to consider all aspects - as bob suggests, testing positions is the best option to start with....

100 deg is almost certainly too far apart.
The old guide was to imagine an equilateral triangle with a monitor at each vertex and your ears at the other i.e. 60 deg. That figure is generally too wide.
Height seems less of an issue, you can angle them down but if they're the wrong distance apart your mix will suffer.

The mental picture Mike paints is the sound field is like a big rubber band stretched between the two monitors. Stretch it too tight and the rubber gets thin in the middle, too close and it is limp.

Seriously just try what I've suggested, your ears may thank you. It'll take under 1 hour.

Bob.

Yeah, it WOULD have taken an hour .. I guess, 'cept I've decided to re-design the shelving and the positioning of my JVC monitor . . . don't ask . . . . Anyhoos, I'm really taken your advice on-board, and if I haven't surfaced back here in 4 hours take it that I've confounded myself with wires and shelves and connectors.

(I really just wanted to reposition my Audio Monitors!!!)

Toodle-pip.

- g

AND THANK YOU . . . for your time!

- g

My pleasure.
Here's a funny thing. During my efforts doing the sound for "that movie" I tried to spice up an establishing exterior shot with a stereo recording of a car driving by. Went out with my recorder and XY mic and recorded nat sounds, chose one and bunged it into the mix. Yeah it worked but as the car was closest to the camera the sound kind of vanished, like the car drove into a hole. Couldn't be bothered fixing it, the doppler shift etc was enough and meh anyway. Actually I was more worried it sounded all a bit over the top.

Fast forward to hearing it in a real preview theatre and it was perfect, I mean it should have been, I recorded it with a stereo mic the same place as the camera was relative to the car in the shot.

Now if I'd fixed it, it would have been wrong and the reason I would have made a bad decision was because my monitors were too far apart.

I never really thought about that until this thread, so thank you, one less mystery in my life.

Bob.

DONE!

Monitors dropped a 12".

Mon L< -----------3' -------------- > Mon R
^
|

3'
|
v
============ME==============

Angle has got to be 60degs now.

Got my JVC to my left, and working; cabling sorted; 2nd PC wired through to a better position . . . . .

Yes, much better ergonomics - and CLEANER, got me duster out and swabbed all the surfaces.

Audio is appreciably more delicate and layered.

- g

The triangle 60 degree rule is pretty much the standard starting point for nearfield monitors, but you left out that the monitors will be pointed in towards the listening position by 30 degress.

For really critical listening many more things come into play that can play havoc on mixing audio. And those are the room modes where peaks and valleys will occur. General rule is to not have monitors placed away from walls by exact multiples (ie 1 foot from back wall and 2 foot from side wall.) Also better to have the wall behind your listening position as far away as possible. Even with nearfields this can destroy stereo seperation in the listening position.

Also better not to point monitors down towards you where the sound will also bounce off the desk. This causes comb filtering that just adds to the mess.

Many many articles on the net about this.

Pointing in and near enough along your suggestions of rear and side walls.

I'm pretty happy now.

My KVM switch now has allowed me to dispense with a further LCD and I'm either punching in here on my 32", or editing.

Thanks guys, I just needed a kick up the rear to get meself sorted out.

- g

Speaker placement matters, of course, but as long as you get some separation, and as long as you get the rear speakers either pointed at your ears, or behind you, I'm not sure it matters anywhere near as much as calibrating the sound level. I use white noise source and a Radio Shack sound meter for all my home theater and computer calibrations. The before/after difference is often quite significant -- not subtle at all. Without doing that, you are shooting in the dark when it comes to doing a 5.1 sound mix.

Put another way, not calibrating your speakers is exactly like trying to do proper color correction on a monitor that hasn't been color-calibrated with at least a Spyder.

No 5.1 surround here, but your pragmatic and well meant point about all-things "calibration" has been duly noted and will continue to be my lodestone in the odyssey towards perfection.

In the meantime though, dun'alf sound better!

- g

My studio engineer friend also mentioned to me when I asked a few days back this same question to him, that he places his studio monitors on foam, about an inch or less thick, to dampen vibration. Might be overkill but his stuff sounds very good.

No 5.1 surround here, Then I think you are rather seriously "overthinking" the problem. There are all sorts of sonic issues with speaker placement in listening rooms. These involve distance from walls and from the listener. They also assume a speaker that actually delivers true bass rather than the "Bose" psycho-acoustic version (meaning it's foolin' ya).

Since you are just doing 2.0, you simply want to make sure that the speakers are the same distance from each respective ear. You still want to balance left and right with some sort of white noise.

If you have a simple subwoofer in your setup, the placement of that object does make a difference. You can find dozens of articles on where to place a subwoofer by just doing a simple Google search. Standing waves are the big issue with this component, and if you place it in such a way that you are sitting at the node (or trough) of a standing wave, you will not be happy.

Lol, I'd never, ever thought you'd regard me as overthinking something.

My "simple" request was just that, simple. I just wanted and got some guides as to what I should be doing with the 2 monitors.

Cheers

G

"Then I think you are rather seriously "overthinking" the problem. There are all sorts of sonic issues with speaker placement in listening rooms. These involve distance from walls and from the listener."

I'd as politely as possible suggest it is you who is overthinking the problem here.
Stereo and surround sound reproduction is about the spatial reproduction of sound.
A "lump" in the frequency response of sound due to room acoustics will have no impact on our perception of where a sound came from. Our sound localization relies very little on the relative loudness of a sound in each ear, it does rely very heavily on the phase relationship and the factor that affects this that we have the most control over in our rooms is speaker placement.
Anyone who doubts my sanity on that claim could perhaps consider the other end of the process, recording stereo sound. The distance between the two microphones is critical, as close to zero as possible is the ideal distance in almost every stereo microphone design.
Another great example of engineers not understanding human hearing was the old Quadrophonic Sound. It failed because the people who came up with the idea failed to understand the most basic and yet very simple aspects of human hearing.

Bob.

Our sound localization relies very little on the relative loudness of a sound in each ear, it does rely very heavily on the phase relationship and the factor that affects this that we have the most control over in our rooms is speaker placement.Yes, that is very definitely true: move the speakers by even a few inches, or move something that reflects or absorbs the sound, and the acoustic effect will be altered significantly.

It is still important to balance the power being delivered to each speaker however. It is amazing how often this gets out of whack by a LOT, especially on a computer where the standard Windows mixer has truly awful controls for L-R balance. It would not surprise me at all to find that a large percentage of computers are out of basic balance by more than 6 dB.


Another great example of engineers not understanding human hearing was the old Quadrophonic Sound. It failed because the people who came up with the idea failed to understand the most basic and yet very simple aspects of human hearing.I don't think that had too much to do with its failure because if it did, the various 5.1 (and higher) systems we have now wouldn't have sold so well.

The real problem with Quadrophonic is simply that it didn't work that well, at least not on vinyl. The signal was encoded, in most cases (at least with vinyl) in a matrix format, a little like the sub-carrier L-R signal used for transmission of broadcast FM (at least in this country). As anyone who has listened to broadcast FM knows, the stereo separation is pretty pathetic. Also, it was marketed mostly with various tricks, like the demo records where someone walks around the room and eventually is talking behind you. What was needed was a great demo record, like the Telarc CD recording of the "1812 Overture." That sold a lot of CD players in the mid-1980s ("warning, Digital Canons," the label read, and sure enough, my amp overload kicked in and shut everything down, the only time that has ever happened).