Speaker Placement - Maximizing Your Enjoyment - PSB Platinum Series Owner's Manual

Speaker Placement — Maximizing Your Enjoyment
Proper loudspeaker placement is an essential ingredient to getting the best sound from your high performance stereo,
multi-channel audio or home theater system. The goal is to reproduce faithfully the audio soundtrack the movie director
or music producer created without calling any attention to the speakers themselves.
Fortunately, it is a straightforward process that
just takes some care and patience. Should you
have a large room and the possibility to arrange
the room as you wish or if you are designing a
room for home entertainment refer to the
diagrams shown here for ideal speaker
placement. In this arrangement all speakers
(except the subwoofer) are placed the same
distance from the listener. In most cases, you'll
need to adapt your speaker placement to a given
room that's less than ideal. Here are a few
speaker placement basics to keep in mind as you
get started:
A. You will generally get the best imaging and other spatial qualities if your front left/right speakers and your usual
seating position form an almost equilateral triangle, with the speakers not quite as far apart from each other as
they are from you. If you must sit closer to one speaker than the other, use the Balance control on your
electronics (or the individual level controls on home theater channels) to give the more distant speaker a
balancing boost in volume.
B. Our tower speakers are designed for optimal listening from the seated to standing position. For our monitors, we
offer accessory speaker stands to achieve the right height if you are not using existing shelves or furniture.
C. The best high-frequency dispersion, producing the widest "sweet spot" in which you and others can sit and enjoy
optimum high-frequency definition, will result when your main speaker enclosures are positioned vertically rather
than horizontally. If you are placing your monitors horizontally, the speakers will still perform very well, but the
seating area where you will enjoy optimum sound will become narrower. We suggest you position the tweeters to
the outside away from the center line. You may prefer to tilt the speakers towards ear level using the adjustable
levelers.
D. If you sit equally distant from both speakers, angling the speakers inward ("toeing them in') about 5 to 10
degrees usually produces the best convergence of high frequencies where you listen. Different listening positions
may require different toe-in.
E. Surround speaker placement is covered in Section 4. Beyond these basics, experiment with positioning for
optimum performance. Please read the placement guidelines that follow. They are about the speakers, the room,
and you.
All distances are equal
5.1 surround speaker placement
3
All distances
are equal
6.1/7.1 surround speaker placement