Helpful tips from Klein + Hummel on monitor placement

[Lunatique]

I recently contacted K+H about my D's and they gave me some helpful tips I had not seen elsewhere before, so I thought I'd share with you guys. Here are snippets from his email:

Answering the question "How close is too close to a wall or corner?"

To answer your question directly I would consider less than 6" to be "close". However, the amount of boost seen from walls depends on the solidity of the wall and the distance from it. A loudspeaker placed next to a brick wall will experience significantly more bass boost than a loudspeaker placed 2' away from a single layer of gypsum wall. Thus one can see that any guideline in an operating manual can only be a simplification of the reality in the room. Please use the recommended settings as a starting point but be prepared to make changes to get a better result. The best results can be obtained by acoustically measuring the loudspeakers in the room and then making appropriate adjustments in positioning, room treatment and equalisation.

Also note that as one moves the monitor away from a wall, a notch starts to appear in the bass response: for example, 1 m (3') leads to a cancellation at 86 Hz. This goes down in frequency as the cabinet is moved further a way from the wall, and vice versa. The solution is to put the monitor next to the wall and then compensate for the acoustical loading using the bass control.

All the above is true for ALL loudspeakers, not just K+H, as bass is omnidirectional.

[Space]

So what are you saying? Can I use my sub or not?

[Lunatique]

Sub placement is always a PITA. I didn't ask about a sub though since I don't use one.

[RemyRAD]

That's all very fine and good but I've never heard a pair of K&H, in any good studios here in the USA? Just because they're German doesn't mean they figured it out like other Germans. I've always been unimpressed with their monitors through the years when hearing them at the AES. So not sure if their recommendations are all that great? But then all of us hear things differently from one another. There is no definitive correct but what sounds good in your control room. Just because the designers design something doesn't mean it will sound the way you expect it to. I don't know a control room yet that didn't need to be tweaked over a period of time. So as much as you are in want of a proper & definitive answer, there is none. You're just going to have to pay for & learn from your purchases/mistakes. One of my specialties is going into control rooms that have been tweaked buy expensive acoustic engineers and turning off everything they did. Check and adjust polarity and then I leave. You don't fix speakers/monitors with equalizer's a list of the PA system. Just because every manufacturer is selling speakers that automatically calibrate themselves for your control room doesn't mean it''sgood. They can't figure out what else did do to sell their products. Its marketing hype. You're going to have to experiment is you are a real engineer.

Experimenting for over 47 years.
Ms. Remy Ann David