Getting better sound from the speakers you already own
Where a speaker sits changes its sound more than most upgrades do. The adjustments below are free, take an afternoon, and are the thing to do before spending anything.
Speakers are usually judged on their own, and then placed wherever the furniture allows. But a speaker and the room it's in are effectively one system — what reaches your ears is the direct sound plus everything that bounces off walls, floor, ceiling and furniture on the way. The room is not a neutral container.
This is why the same pair can sound excellent in one place and muddy in another, and why placement changes often produce a bigger improvement than an equipment upgrade.
Start with the triangle
The basic arrangement: your two speakers and your listening position form roughly an equilateral triangle. If the speakers are two metres apart, sit roughly two metres from each.
Angle them inward so they point at or slightly to the outside of your head. This is toe-in, and it's worth experimenting with — more toe-in generally tightens the central image and narrows the soundstage; less widens it and can make the centre vague. There's no correct amount, only what works in your room.
Get the tweeters near ear height when seated. A tweeter firing at your knees or above your head loses high-frequency detail, because treble is directional in a way bass is not. Stands, books, anything that raises them.
Distance from walls controls the bass
This is the adjustment with the largest audible effect.
A speaker close to a wall reinforces bass — sometimes usefully, often to the point of boom and muddiness that swallows everything above it. Pull speakers out from the wall and bass tightens; push them back and it fills out. Corners are the extreme case, reinforcing from two directions at once and usually sounding worst.
Start around 30cm from the rear wall and move in 10cm steps, listening to a familiar bass-heavy track each time. The difference between 20cm and 50cm is not subtle.
Try to keep the two speakers symmetrical relative to side walls. If one is in a corner and the other is in open space, they reach you differently and the stereo image collapses toward the louder side.
The subwoofer crawl. If you have a subwoofer, put it in your listening seat, play something with steady bass, and crawl around the floor at the room's edges. Where it sounds best is where the subwoofer should go. It looks ridiculous and it works, because bass response depends entirely on room position.
First reflections
Sound reaching you directly is what you want. Sound arriving a fraction later, bounced off a nearby surface, smears detail and blurs the stereo image.
Find the reflection points with a mirror: sit in your listening position, have someone slide a mirror along the side wall, and wherever you can see a speaker in it is a first reflection point. Same for the wall behind the speakers and the ceiling.
You don't need acoustic panels. A bookcase filled unevenly, a thick curtain, a rug on a hard floor between you and the speakers — all reduce reflections meaningfully. The floor bounce in particular is significant on hard flooring, and a rug is the single easiest fix in this whole article.
Things that quietly ruin things
- Speakers inside a cabinet or bookshelf niche. Enclosing them creates resonances and blocks the bass port on rear-ported designs. If a speaker must go in a shelf, leave as much space behind it as possible.
- Objects directly in front. A television between speakers reflects sound back at you. Pulling speakers slightly forward of the screen helps.
- Asymmetry. One speaker against curtains and the other against bare plaster gives you two different speakers.
- Sitting against the back wall. Bass builds up at room boundaries. Moving your seat forward by half a metre can clean up the low end more than any equipment change.
How to evaluate changes
Use two or three tracks you know extremely well, and change one thing at a time. Listen for whether voices sit precisely in the centre, whether bass is defined rather than a general rumble, and whether you can place instruments in space.
Your ears adapt quickly, which makes A/B comparison over minutes unreliable. Trust large obvious differences and be sceptical of small ones you have to strain to hear.
Do all of this before buying anything. It's free, it's reversible, and it routinely produces more improvement than the next tier of speaker would have.