Nowadays, getting your home theater setup started might look extremely easy. On the market, you can find various fairly-priced options of soundbars or stereo speakers that promise excellent audio quality, making your movie-watching setup even more fun and immersive. With additional technologies such as Dolby Atmos, and various other tricks up their sleeves, these home theater setups are simply too good to pass by.
Unfortunately, sometimes what’s advertised doesn’t really measure up to what the speakers sound like in person. Of course, one of the reasons might be their quality or sound profile not fitting your requirements. That being said, the reason for the underwhelming sound might be much more trivial, making it also easy to fix. With both soundbars and speakers, their placement is especially crucial. This means it’s extremely easy to improve your home audio, as you might simply need to adjust your speakers a little bit.
Why is speaker placement so important?
Both the hardware and the software can get confused
Even though you might want to plop your speakers anywhere you find some free space and get to watching already, it’s good to spend some time on your audio setup. For modern speakers and soundbars, their placement is absolutely crucial. What’s more, it’s extremely important just because of passive acoustics, but it also impacts the computational surround sound that many new speaker systems employ.
When it comes to the good, old acoustics, everything comes down to how the sound behaves. Sound waves are produced by quickly moving membranes in the speakers and then spread around the room. Unfortunately, these waves reflect off of any surface, which also means interrupting or distorting the sound. Therefore, the fewer interruptions around the room, and especially between the speakers and your ears, the better.
When it comes to modern speakers and soundbars, there is an additional, software-related problem. Various audio solutions nowadays offer virtual spatial sound and audio correction. The first function attempts to create a 3D-like sound by bouncing sound waves off the ceiling, while the latter allows you to compensate for your room’s weak acoustics by adjusting the way your speakers fire. All of these are excellent, but precise positioning is absolutely crucial for these features to work.
Where should I put my soundbar?
The obvious place is usually the best, but be careful of tight spaces
Soundbars, over the last few years, have (for good reason!) dominated the home audio space. They are the hassle-free option: one unit that contains everything you need, and usually with speakers that seem to punch much above their weight class. They also come with a lot of the newest software tricks, so you can also make use of virtual surround audio or many other goodies.
That being said, their simplicity does not mean they are immune to mistakes, and unfortunately, placement mistakes are not only the most common, but they also impact your audio the most, often taking it from high-grade to something totally unlistenable.
Generally, placing a soundbar should be easy. It’s the place you’d think of in the first place: just in front of the TV, perfectly in the middle. Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, this also means getting rid of the clutter surrounding the soundbar, especially in front and above it. This allows for adequate stereo reproduction, as well as helps the upward-firing speakers create the virtual channels behind you. There are some caveats, though. Sometimes soundbars, in order to maximize the virtual channels’ performance, ask for the front-facing side to be elevated a bit, but it’s usually done thanks to feet built into the soundbar.
On the other hand, there are some specific placements that you should avoid. For example, even though some stereo systems work great when placed inside a TV cabinet, you shouldn’t do that with a soundbar. The wood surrounding it from every side will make its performance much worse, making virtual 3D sound nearly impossible to get right. Remember about this, especially if your TV cabinet has doors. Closing the soundbar inside the cabinet will make the sound muted and illegible.
You also shouldn’t mount the soundbar over your TV, especially if you’ve already got it mounted rather high on the wall. Soundbars rely on bouncing sound waves off of walls, and it works much worse when they are too close to the ceiling. As usual, remember to declutter everything in a straight line from the speakers to the place you’ll be watching from, as you want the direct way to your ears to be as unobstructed as possible.
Where should I put my home theater speakers?
With great freedom come placement charts
Even though soundbars have come a long way in the last decade or two, standalone speakers are still the end-goal of every home theater. Not only do they have (nearly) unlimited extension possibilities, but they also offer much better quality thanks purely to their much more significant size. What’s more, even if you’re looking for something affordable, they are also the king of price-to-performance.
What you’re giving away, though, is convenience. With speakers, the question of correct placement is not only much more complicated, it also varies greatly depending on your setup. So, in order to not get too deep into the weeds, we’ll just deal with stereo setups. This is the standard 2.0 sound: one left channel and one right channel.
As you’d expect, the correct placement for these speakers is, in a sense, similar to the soundbar. You want to place them on two sides of the TV, at the same height and equal distance to the screen. However, there are a few more things to do here. You also need to adjust the speakers based on the distance between the TV and your couch. The general rule is based on an equilateral triangle, where the three tips are made by two speakers and the center of the screen. The only thing to do now is to turn the speakers to face the couch. However, don’t place them perfectly towards the center, but rather around half the angle between the center of the couch and the position where the speakers are pointing perfectly forward.
As you can see, the freedom of being able to customize your audio exactly to your liking comes with a bit longer instruction manual. In general, though, there are just a few common things that you should remember not to do.
The most common thing is, unfortunately, treating speakers like furniture. This means covering them with baubles or placing a flower in front of them. All of these are murderous to sound clarity, and can introduce all kinds of rattles and noises when you’re watching TV. Another thing you need to do is to keep the speakers as close to level as possible. If you place one speaker high up, and the other close to the floor, your stereo effect will be terrible, making watching movies pretty irritating.
One universal rule about speaker placement is always the same, regardless if you’re using a 2.0 or a 21.1 setup. When setting up speakers, check your channels at least twice. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard stories about speakers being hooked up reversed, with the left speaker playing right channel audio etc. It’s a silly mistake, but it’s also so easy to make.
