You’ve already made one good decision today by deciding to upgrade your home speakers, now it’s time to make a second: Don’t try setting up your speakers without some advice from your favorite neighborhood electronics store!
Sure, you could just take them out of the box and set them up willy-nilly around your house, but you already went through the effort of picking out nice speakers, so shouldn’t you take a little more time to make sure you are getting the best sound and richness from them?
Of course. Let’s go on this soundscape journey together. We promise it will be worth it.
Placement, Placement, Placement
The most important thing when it comes to setting your speakers up is placement. There are some basics you want to keep in mind before we get into the nitty-gritty, like making sure that all of your speakers have an unobstructed path to where you are going to be sitting while listening to them.
No hiding speakers in shrubbery, behind bookcases, or in other spots where their sound is going to find an obstacle to reach you. You want to make sure they are all at your sitting ear height, as well.
Advanced Placement, Placement, Placement
Our good friends at Dolby know sound, so they are a great place to turn to for setup recommendations. But we can help you through their basics, starting with your front center speaker.
This speaker should be in a direct line to your viewing area. The center speaker is also going to act as our starting point to measure most everything else. For your other two front speakers, you’ll want to place them to the right and left of your TV screen, respectively. You want them to form a roughly a 22-degree angle if you were to draw a line from them to you and then back to the center speaker.
For the rear two speakers, you’ll want to place them behind your sitting area – and these you can place at a little above ear height. Behind doesn’t mean hidden, though! Again, using your sitting location as a center point, but this time making an angle with the front side speakers, not the center one, you’ll want to create a 90-degree angle on each side.
And last but not least – the subwoofer! The exact placement of it doesn’t matter much, but just try to not have it sitting in a corner so it performs as best as possible. Besides that, go with what location on the floor works best for your living space!
Trial and Error
No matter how good you are at placing speakers, don’t feel like this is a game and the buzzer just hit zero and you are on the foul line and only have one shot to make it to regionals. That is to say, you don’t have to get it right on the first try.
There’s nothing stopping you from testing, rearranging, and then testing out your speakers some more. There are so many acoustical variables that go into how your speakers sound, that it is nearly impossible to know how everything will sound until you set it up and give it a go.
You don’t have to go on the search for perfect sound alone, though. Give us a call or stop in today and our local experts will help you in anything you – or your ears – need on your road to enlistenment.