positioning of speakers

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Oleg34

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 13, 2014
Messages
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Let me ask you a dumb question. Is it true how you position your speaker is important in terms of getting the best listening experience. Also is it true a good sound card matters as well?.
 
Not only is a good sound card important but so are good speakers just as important.
 
sound cards matter... more for headphones in my experience...unless you have very good source files / amp and speakers... matters but not nearly as much as the quality of the amp and speakers

yes positioning matters a lot...blah blah blah.. try to get the tweeters at ear level.. experiment with pointing them at you (angled) and straight ahead... see what seems best.

if you are using speakers with rear ports try to keep them off the wall some
 
It's all up to the radiating patterns of your speakers how much the positioning affects them. As a rule of thumb you should keep the tweeter at about your ear level and toe-in the speakers so that they point at your listening position. The rear port stuff mentioned earlier is BS. You don't want full bass extension when the speaker is back up to the wall because the halving of the bass radiating pattern will boost the bass energy by 6 decibels. What you want, actually, in that case is a reduction to your bass level. You should stuff a sock to the port basically if you place your speaker right next to the wall unless the speaker is a plastic soap box thingy with no bass to start with.

Some speakers have problems with direct signal so they actually sound better when pointed straight.

Sound cards matter some, speakers and amps matter a lot. You can buy an awesome sound card for 120 bucks but you can only get a real craptastic turd of a speaker for the same money.

You have to spend 5-10 times the money for your speakers if you want to take even a fraction of the advantage your 120 dollar investment to a sound card gave you. If you use logicrap desktop boxes you're better off using onboard sound. Won't make any difference and save you some money.
 
If your speakers have high-frequency drivers, or tweeters, many of the different types are directional.

This means if they aren't angled towards the listening position, you'll miss out on the high-frequency sounds coming from them.
It's especially true for ribbon and horn type tweeters, though dome types are less pronounced in this regard.

I very much recommend at least a pair of Micca bookshelfs and a proper amp (Topping, Schitt, Bravo, Aune), and skipping on the "PC speaker" junk altogether.
 
Thing is, my room is very small. I can't even hookup speakers to my TV due to lack of space in my room.
 
Oleg34 said:
Let me ask you a dumb question. Is it true how you position your speaker is important in terms of getting the best listening experience. Also is it true a good sound card matters as well?.
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Speaker placement always matters and sound card... well, that varies. In many cases, onboard audio will offer quality that you can't distinguish from a $200 sound card. But also in many cases onboard audio has high distortion and poor SNR and you hear hum, hiss, high-pitched whine (particularly from the motors in your hard drives), etc.

If you don't hear problems with onboard then it's typically best to dump any potential money for a sound card into getting better speakers instead. Assuming you don't have need of any specific features on a sound card for audio production or possibly gaming (if you use the simulated surround modes for headphones and stuff that some cards come with - and personally I never did use that sort of thing).

Speaker placement and room layout is as important if not more important than the actual quality of speaker you get. Though it doesn't matter quite as much in nearfield (i.e. relatively small speakers that are optimized for a relatively close listening position of just a few feet) especially if you don't crank it up very loud.
 
Oleg34 said:
Thing is, my room is very small. I can't even hookup speakers to my TV due to lack of space in my room.
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The Miccas are 11" wide and 16" tall. If that's still too large, there's the Aune X3 Which are only 8" by 6" by 5".
 
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True. That's why i want a dedicated sound card to avoid interference. Also i am low on budget.
 
Oleg34 said:
True. That's why i want a dedicated sound card to avoid interference. Also i am low on budget.
Click to expand...

My suggestion is buy some speakers (and a separate amp if they require it) and hook them up to onboard and see how it sounds. If you hear any issues with it, THEN get a sound card.
 
Do not skimp on speakers. Even if you spend thousands feeding them, a crap pair of speakers will sound like crap.
 
My suggestion on speakers is skip the computer section and go to either the home audio or car audio sections of your store. Most low to mid-range computer speakers have speaker cones that look like things I used to salvage from cheap transistor radios.

A decent set of what used to be called "bookshelf" speakers will be far better. And with all of the folks pimping out their rides with portable earthquake devices, there has been a lot of R&D on making small good sounding auto speakers.

I am still using a set of Radio Shack Minimus 7's I bought in the 80's when sound cards still had amplifiers on the card. They sound better then any current affordable computer speakers.
 
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