WILSON AUDIO Sophia Series 2 Owner's Manual page 26

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ers. By virtue of its shape, a square room is the perfect medium for building and
sustaining standing waves. These rooms heavily influence the music played by
loudspeakers, greatly diminishing the listening experience.
Long, narrow, rectangular rooms also pose their own special acoustical prob-
lems for speaker setup. They have the ability to create several standing wave
nodes, which will have different standing wave frequency exaggerations depending
on where you are sitting. Additionally, these long rooms are often quite lean in the
bass near the center of the room. Rectangular rooms are still preferred to square
rooms because, by having two sets of dissimilar length walls, standing waves are
not as strongly reinforced and will dissipate more quickly than in a square room.
In these rooms, the preferred speaker position for spatial placement and midrange
resolution would be on the longer walls. Bass response would be reinforced by
speaker placement on the short walls.
In many cases, L-shaped rooms offer the best environment for speaker setup.
Ideally, speakers should be set up along the primary (longest) leg of the room.
They should fire from the end of the leg (short wall) toward the L, or they should
be along the longest wall. In this way, both speakers are firing the same distance to
the back wall. The asymmetry of the walls in L-shaped rooms resists the buildup
of standing waves (see Figure 2 ).
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