Speaker Placement: Our Expert Guide to Getting the Best from Your Loudspeakers

While a great pair of speakers can elevate your listening experience with powerful, detailed sound, they can underperform if they aren’t positioned correctly.

Luckily, small adjustments to your speaker setup can make a big difference to the quality of your listening experience.

At Bowers & Wilkins, we’re not only experts in the design and engineering of loudspeakers – we’re also highly experienced in pairing them with real living spaces and setting up the perfect hi-fi system. After all, we’ve spent more than six decades in pursuit of the best possible sound.

In this blog, we’ll cover the fundamentals of speaker setup, helping you get the most out of your favourite music, movies and games.

Before you begin the setup process, however, it’s important to consider whether you’ve chosen the right speakers for your space. This depends on a few key factors: your room size, how you plan to use your system and your budget.

Where to place your speakers

Choosing the right loudspeaker for your space is the foundation of great sound.

We’ve already mentioned that a room’s size can have a fundamental impact on the size and type of loudspeaker you should buy – now let’s explain why.

The moving components in a loudspeaker are called drive units, because they work to vibrate – or ‘drive’ – the air in your room. The bigger the loudspeaker and the bigger its drive units – or the more drive units it employs, in some cases – then the more air it can move. This is relevant because the larger your room, the more air your speakers will be asked to move, and as a result, the harder they’ll have to work. To use the most extreme example, the tiny drive units fitted to most desktop speaker systems would sound ‘lost’ in a large concert hall. In the same vein, a large pair of floorstanders will excite too much air in a small space, sounding both sonically and, to a surprisingly real extent, physically intimidating.

For that reason, choosing speakers of an appropriate size to fit your available space is a significant step towards better hi-fi. That means being realistic not only about the room you have available, but also about where you can actually position your speakers within that space. If you have to place your speakers close to a wall, or a corner, you might find your buying choices are rather limited.

Understanding your room

Why? Simply, because every loudspeaker will interact with its physical environment, and especially with nearby boundaries – chiefly, walls. Place your speakers close up to a back wall, and in almost all cases you’ll find the level of bass increases, but this can be at the expense of openness, stereo imaging and speed. Bigger speakers will simply exacerbate this effect, sounding bigger and more bass-heavy than ever. On the other hand, place small speakers too far out into the room, and they can sound lost – again, because they’re being asked to drive too much air (and may have been designed to rely on that so-called ‘boundary reinforcement’ from the walls as part of their bass tuning).

For that reason, it’s vital you plan where to put your speakers before you buy: the precise science of positioning can vary, often being influenced by cabinet design, but most manufacturers and dealers will be able to give you guidelines. One rule almost everyone will agree on is that placing speakers in corners – or even close to, and equidistant from, side and rear walls – is a definite no-no: the horn effect this creates will cause significant amounts of ‘boom’, with this becoming the dominant element of the sound.

The acoustics of your room can also influence sound in other ways: speakers on a hard, polished floor will take on a significantly different character than the results you’d get from a warmer, softer, carpeted room. The cause is sonic reflections: a minimalist modern room is more acoustically ‘live’ than one awash with soft furnishings and the like.

Want to hear this in action? Go into an empty, unfurnished room and clap your hands: you’ll hear an instant echo or – if you’re very unlucky – a kind of ‘boing’ tone to the reverberation. We know of one hi-fi reviewer who greatly amused estate agents by going into the rooms of properties he was considering buying and doing this clap test, but consider it in a different way: if you ever go to a social gathering held in a sparsely furnished room, you’re likely to find conversations much harder to follow than in one with lots of soft furnishings.

It’s immensely difficult for your retailer to compensate for this effect in a typical demonstration area, but it’s worth mentioning the particular properties of your living room – they may be able to recommend equipment able to compensate for your acoustics.

Getting the basics right

Once you’ve chosen the right speakers and understood your room, it’s time to set up your system correctly.

Start by positioning your speakers so they are equidistant from your listening position, forming a balanced stereo image. Ideally, nothing should sit between you and the drive units, as this can interfere with clarity and detail.

Try to ensure your speakers are positioned at the same height, with the tweeters approximately at ear level when you’re seated. For floorstanding speakers and standmount models on proper stands, this is usually straightforward – but it’s worth considering carefully if you’re placing bookshelf speakers on furniture.

Symmetry is key: both speakers should be positioned in as similar an environment as possible, with equal spacing from walls and surrounding objects. Even small inconsistencies can affect how your system sounds.

It’s also worth paying attention to stability. Floorstanding speakers and stands should be properly supported using spikes or pads, depending on your flooring, and everything should be level. A simple spirit level – or even a smartphone app – can help here. If you’re placing speakers on stands, consider using a fixing material such as Blu-Tack to improve stability.

How do I fine-tune my speakers’ positioning?

For optimum stereo imaging – that sense of the sound existing in three dimensions – you should place your speakers equidistant from your listening position, at the same relative height (using stands, if appropriate), and slightly angled inwards, or ‘toed-in’, towards your listening position. Imagine an equilateral triangle, with the top point of the triangle being your listening position, and the flat base representing the plane occupied by the speakers: simply angle each speaker in so that it follows the triangle back towards its apex, at your seat. Alternatively, you can use a tape measure (and a friend) to achieve the same result: use the measure as a ‘sightline’ and have your friend angle in each speaker until you’re looking directly at its drive units.

This effort will generate a superior sonic ‘soundstage’ where the speakers all but disappear from the room. Instead, the sound should appear to be hanging in space between your speakers, as if it were being generated by a third, invisible speaker: after all, ‘stereo’ comes from the Greek for ‘solid’, not ‘two channels’!

This goal of stereo imaging is a true soundstage with both depth (reaching away beyond your speakers to your wall) and height (up towards your ceiling), giving you the sonic scale to cope with anything from the most intimate of acoustic tracks to a full orchestral work.

Final thoughts

Getting the best from your loudspeakers isn’t an exact science, but by following these guidelines, you’ll unlock significantly better performance than leaving placement to chance.

With a little time, experimentation and careful listening, you can refine your setup to suit your space perfectly – and in doing so, transform how you experience sound in your home.