Soundstage Shifts Left

I find even in what appears to be a perfectly symmetrical room final speaker placement adjustments need be made by ear. Suddenly everything will lock in.

It is a tedious process.

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I have a very old house (1915) and after some of the same issues mentioned above discovered the walls arenā€™t exactly plumb. Iā€™ve discovered differences in measurement between the bottoms/tops of my speakers to the rear wall (immediately behind them) and are heavily impacted by the rear wall with respect to balance, soundstage and bass. I have outriggers and found that fine tuning by tipping forward or back was needed after initial placement. Moral of the storyā€¦donā€™t assume itā€™s only symmetry left to right and front to back. Top to bottom can be a factor.

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Oh great, now my speakers can have a bad load :rofl:

I always thought in terms of how far apart, how close to the back wall, but always symmetrical. It never crossed my mind to deviate from those linear conceptions.

I used Nordost system solution/ set-up & tuning disc to help me dial in final speaker location. As mentioned above, no 100% symmetric room, not just room dimension, but also furniture, window, etc, therefore, the two speakers will be at two different sound environment points, with different frequency responses (measuring individual speaker at the listening position). The differences in my case was relatively small. Funny, the soundstage was shifted a little to the left too before the final adjustments. During the adjustments using the disc, I was not focusing on centering the center image, more on getting the same frequency response from the two speakers, at the end, it helped a lot in soundstage too.

Thatā€™s actually a lucky coincidence, less strong standing waves with non-plumb walls.

ā€œMASTER SETā€ SPEAKER POSITIONING is one technique for finding the optimal speaker location and is nearly always not symmetrical.

Very correct @brett66. To boot, my listening room is a dormer room (craftsman style house) on the 2nd floor and where the roof and wall meets the corner is slanted to the outside direction of the house. Inside corner is truncated before the corner and has an additional angle. Hard to describe but there are no traditional corners above my speakers. Youā€™d think what the heck, not perfect but Iā€™ve had the best bass vs. previous houses. I attribute this to reduced corner loading. Also, center image is locked in and deep.

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Been frustrated with this problem for 2 years, your suggestion solved it.

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Cool, glad it worked!