Respect your knowledge and effort to try and give useful tips for people. (laymen) I noticed a glaring lack of one topic from this " tips " video as with most videos. ... Be nice if someone came along and filled in the gaps in these talking points. =)

Love that Per Welinder deck! Good ol days

I've tried it all. I get the best soundstage and imaging w/nearfield listening. Speakers are 6 feet apart, and my listening position is 4 feet in front of the speakers. Takes any room issues out of the equation.

Very good. You know what you're talking about. I also like audio and sound for the reasons you do too

Due to the shape of my apartment room(s), the base frequencies were cancelling out. So I had to reverse the wires on one woofer. Now I also seemed to have a push/pull effect. Anywhere I am located within the room, or even further away at my computer desk, the base is the same. No dead or reduced areas. Fortunately when I built these speakers back in 1978, I placed switches that allowed reversal of mid-range drivers and tweeters, and so I did not have to open the speaker box to set them properly to compensate for the speaker wires being reverse at the power amplifier. Each has one 15" woofer, two dome mid-range drivers, and four dome tweeters. I did recently improve the high frequencies a tad with a pair of Aperion Audio MKII Planar-Ribbon Super Tweeters that have up to 40kHz frequency response. That's 20kHz per ear. LOL

Hi Doug ... excellent advice. I hope you don't mind if I add a couple of thoughts here... 1) Getting speakers well away from the front wall is not always an option, especially where the system is in a multi-purpose room, like a living room or rec room. In that case I generally suggest people draw up a little floor plan of their room and mark the areas where they would be willing to place speakers, without interfering with traffic and other uses for the room. Then within that space, they can play with the speaker placement to find the best spots available to them. 2) Symmetry is indeed crucial in establishing a good sweet spot. But the old "that looks the same" doesn't cut it. I generally get out the measuring tape and mark out speaker positions in 1/2 inch increments. This is because the wavelength at 20khz is about 2 3/4 inch and even a 1 inch difference could place your tweeters out of phase at the listening position. So as a target you want your crucial distances to be within 1/2 an inch... less is better. Some might argue, but that small difference is audible in the upper frequencies. 3) I generally favour keeping the distance between speakers closer to the distance from the listening position to a line across the front of the speakers... i.e. 6 feet forward means 6 feet apart. It might be just me but that always seems to sound the best. Cheers... and thanks!

Great video!

I just took your suggestions and applied to my room. I had my Sabrina speakers too close together. I set at 7 ft on center and 48 inch from front wall. OMG the soundstage and image so much better. Thanks 🙏. Greg

Thanks for your straight forward aprouch, it worked, only on certain cds. Not all CDs sound stage, imaging. Depends on the quality of the music. Some are recorded well, some simply arnt. Some you can find a good center, but sound stage will suffer, get modern well recorded music, it really helps, The Pink Floyd Pulse CD live is incredible on good CD players and speakers, it will blow your socks off. Anyway thank you for your time and help. Saved me alot of time. That balance of ft. Speaker to speaker, then distance to your listening position, being the same, simply works. Thanks again, and remember folks Pulse CD live. Get and enjoy! 🤘💪❤️😁

Wow… I’ve been an audiophile for sometime now, and have concluded almost everything that you have mentioned over many years. I have about 9 feet behind my speakers, I’m roughly about 8 feet away from the centre point in between my speakers…. And then I have another 10 feet behind me. pretty much any speaker I put in this spot, gives me sound stage depth. Even inexpensive speakers will do it. I also make sure that each speaker is exactly the same distance away from my ears with a laser measuring device. This video has definitely give me confidence to trust your advice. Keep up the great work.

Great advice I guess a lot of people already no this but you really have to try it in order to be shocked and amazed I listen for many years with my speakers a foot apart right up against the wall I was really blown away one day when I experimented with us I never knew it made such a difference

Another great video as always! Keep it up! I would just add that the speaker type (panel, box, opeb-baffle,...) and not only that but also the tweeter type (dome, folded ribbon, ribbon,...) matter greatly. Moreover, a preamp can help with creating a better more 3d soundstage that the spakers than can project into the room. I found many tube preamps to do that for me, but also some ss preamps.

Good video and explanation. Room acoustics have a huge effect on sound as well. Each room and each set of speakers are different. Certainly you know that already.

Very helpful information

Thanks Doug. Great video! Unfortunately, my small room is inflexible, so I have to have my speakers no more than 6 feet apart, and I'm probably 8-10 feet from them. They also flank my 32" flatscreen TV, which sits between them on a TV stand, which may cause some reflections, but it's all I have to work with. I also can't get them any closer to me, and further from the wall behind them (they're about 2 feet from it), or they'll be in the middle of the room. And, I'm sitting right in front of a window that covers the whole back wall of my room (behind me), but the window is covered by vertical blinds, which breaks up reflections behind me. I prefer a bit of a forward sound, bcause the rock and blues I listen to doesn't usually have a lot of depth in the recordings, and I prefer lead vocals and instruments coming from right at the plane or even a bit in front of the plane of the speakers. I really don't like hearing them coming from much behind the speakers. But, I do like depth in the sound of the ensemble, (for instance, the drums should be coming from behind other players) and I want to hear air around the instuments and a three dimensional effect. I don't want everything to sound flat, two dimensional, with everything bunched up right at the plane of the speakers. I want it to sound like eveything is floating in the air in front of me, between the front of the speakers and even some sounds appearing to sound coming from further behind the wall behind them, but not drastically behind it. So, I do like a bit of depth, but it probably isn't as important to me as those that listen to a lot of symphonies and other classical works

Great explanation thank you, question how do you get that center voice or image to be directly on center? when called for in the recording.

Do certain types of speakers image better (or easier) than others? For example, panel speakers vs horn vs open baffle etc.

Thanks for tips. My room is on the small side, 16X13ft, so I have placed my speakers about 4 feet from the front wall. The soundstage depth is ok- I can hear as deep as the front wall (behind the speakers). I’ll try to move the speakers deeper into the room, but I will then have to push the couch closer to the wall behind me. How have you found the bass to be affected when you move a bit back from the equidistant triangle position?

This is so helpful on so many levels. You really cover every single aspect of the topic. Could you share with us maybe 10-12 recordings where the soundstage seemed to extend beyond the rear wall as you state at 6:16? I want to hear the effect you are taking about.

Very good and informative, but that doesn't work for me. My room is 11 x 11. How can I deal with that? Gilberto

My MMG’s are 7’9” apart 9 feet from my nose. 45degree toe in. Side wall reflections are the most important. I have 42” behind the frequencies and 5 ft to the wall behind.

Good, but what if the recording itself is screwed up? This is the case usually in modern recording usually? Meaning that what we hear it is not where the instrument are placed during the recording session.

I replied to Mark mywords comment below. I thought I'd also post my reply ... ... Mark. Your comment is super valuable as I try to choose gear to improve Soundstage. - Tube pre amp ... which one ? -Ss pre amp which one ? -Tweeter choice..which is best from the list you gave - speaker design, box, open baffle etc. Which is best ? - I also heard concentric Tweeter and woofer is good ??? - are there any metrics for Soundstage and imaging. Terms like wide and deep are relative. Can we set a scale 1 to 10 wide and 1 to 5 deep, 1 to 5 imaging and test gear giving results, like we do with frequency responses. I realize it's subjective but a scale and a number and list the gear and room dimensions and speaker placement , in your opinion, would be much better than simply wide or super deep. In other words can we make this scientific because it's impossible to determine how to buy Source Dac Pre amp or integrated or power amp Speakers Cable , power supply etc. Budget vs money no object It would be good to have list of actual gear for say 5 different budget levels . The combinations of all the above are endless and since we can't really listen before we buy we need more metrics

Symmetry is fine in theory (and in an anechoic chamber....) but in reality real rooms can vary the channel balance because of construction and furnishings. I have set speakers perfectly symmetrically and got a channel imbalance of 3dB! So in reality...forget symmetry and move speakers front and back to get the central imaging for YOUR room! 👍

Bob Robbins has a noteworthy KZfaq video on speaker placement.

Do you measure the distance from speakers from the distance between the tweeter or the corner of the front baffle?

not anybody has 7 feet of space to leave behind speakers for that sound stage, sadly

biggest headache,,, to find great recordings

Soundstage and depth are not an illusion. They are set up by a combination of direct and reflected sound. Soundstage width comes from the corner secondary reflections. Depth comes from the front wall reflections. Your speaker positioning experience illustrates this.

You tips are good, but they are limited by the actual speaker itself. I've seen good room placement make an average speaker sound good, but never great. Really good sound comes from really good speakers well - placed.

Most loudspeakers, of any type of design formation, will not sound their best when the speaker is more than 4 to 5 feet from the back wall to front baffle. The bass will suffer indeed, but tonal balance needs some structure of a treated wall side to side or front to back. The stereo illusion on a well designed speaker will be outstanding USUALLY, WHEN that baffle is no more than 4 feet from the back wall, in my experience,. An isosceles triangle can work as well as an equilateral triangle. Just make sure your listening seat is no more than 2 or 3 feet further away than the loudspeaker distance between them. (Robert Harley......quite right). Near field listening is simply for engineers not music rooms where concert hall ambiance is primary. Hopefully your room is a minimum of 20 feet in length.

If you don’t take on. Board what this man is saying everything else you do to improve your listening experience will be a waste of time .

The master set is better and the end all for speaker placement, period end of discussion