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Feel free to direct me if there is a post about this somewhere; I coudn't find it. But I have been wondering recently about monitor placement. Can the angle you point your monitors and the distance they are from eachother affect phase issues like comb filtering? I would expect so. What I have been thinking of doing recently is angling my monitors (Dyn BM6A) so they face more "out" like a stereo when bands come in to evaluate mixes, so they can hear everything better when they sit behind my "sweet spot." What I am afraid will happen is that when I turn my monitors back in to my mixing position, they will be in a little bit different spot or different angle, and the comb filtering/phase anomolies that I have gotten used to will all be different now.
Of course it would be nice to have some big mains for the bands to bang their head to, but that isn't possible in my setup.
What do you guys do when setting up your monitors to keep everything in phase as best as possible? Or do I just worry too much?

Comments

BobRogers Tue, 05/23/2006 - 09:38

From what I understand, neither the "sweet spot" or comb filtering should be affected by slight changes in the monitor position.

My definition of the sweet spot is a position in the center of one axis of the room that is neither in a node or antinode of the first several front to back room modes. In a rectangular room, that is something like 38% of the way along the long axis of the room. In a nonrectangular room you have to find it by ear or spend a lot of computer power computing the solution to some partial differential equations. The bottom line is that the sweet spot depends on the geometry of the room, not on the position of the speakers.

Comb filtering occurs when a slightly delayed version of a signal (e.g. an echo) is added to the original version. If you have used the mirror trick to put sound absorbing material on all flat surfaces that give direct reflections from the speakers to your sweet spot, moving the speakers by an inch or two should not make a difference.

Of course, in addition to the issues you name, stereo image depends on the angle of the speakers , but that's something you can adjust by ear after moving the speakers.

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