Changes that improve any listening room.
A tape measure, a mirror and twenty minutes. No app, no purchase — most of these cost nothing but moving things. Do them in order: each one is easier to hear once the one before it is right.
Make both speakers the same distance from your ears.
This is the one that centres the voice. If one speaker reaches you even a few centimetres before the other, the singer drifts toward it — your ear judges direction by which sound arrives first.
Sit where you listen and measure from the front of each speaker to the point between your ears. Get the two within a couple of centimetres. Move the chair, not the speakers, if the speakers are otherwise where you want them.
Listen for: a mono recording, or a solo voice. It should hang in one point, dead centre, not spread across the speakers.
Sit at the point of a 60° triangle.
You don't need a protractor. An equilateral triangle is 60°, so at 60° your distance to each speaker equals the distance between them. Two metres apart? Sit two metres from each.
Sit closer and the stage widens but the centre thins; sit further back and it narrows and solidifies. Anywhere between about 50° and 70° works — beyond that the centre image starts to tear in half.
Pull the speakers away from the wall behind them.
The wall behind a speaker sends its sound back, delayed. Where that delay is half a wavelength, the reflection cancels the speaker. The frequency is roughly 86 divided by the gap in metres:
- 50 cm from the wall — a hole around 171 Hz: the body of a kick drum, the chest of a male voice.
- 1 m — the hole drops to about 86 Hz, below most fundamentals, where the room tends to smooth it.
- Panels and dipoles radiate backwards too — give them 1.5 m if you can.
Closer to the wall also means boomier bass. If yours are against it, try 30 cm further out before you buy anything.
Don't sit in the middle of the room.
Every room resonates between its walls. The lowest of those resonances cancels exactly halfway between the front and back walls — so the most natural place to put a chair is often the one spot where a whole bass note vanishes.
Move the chair forward or back along the centre line — that keeps you equidistant from both speakers, so nothing in step one is undone.
Check it yourself: play a steady bass line and walk slowly from the speakers toward the back of the room. Where the bass thins out, you're standing in a null. You'll hear yourself walk out of it.
Find the first reflections with a mirror.
The first bounce off each side wall arrives a few milliseconds after the direct sound — just late enough to smear where instruments sit. There is exactly one spot on each wall that sends a speaker's bounce to your ears.
Sit in your seat. Have someone slide a mirror flat along the side wall at ear height. Where you can see a speaker in the mirror, that's the spot. Mark it. Do the other side.
If you treat, treat both sides, in pairs. Damping only one wall leaves the two halves of the stereo image less alike than before.
Aim both speakers alike.
How much toe-in is a matter of taste: more gives focus and sends less sound at the side walls, less gives width. What isn't taste is symmetry. If one speaker is turned in more than the other, its treble reaches you brighter, and cymbals and the air around voices lean to that side.
Measure from the back corner of each cabinet to the wall behind it, both corners, both speakers. Make the pairs match.
If the room rings, go thicker, not wider.
Clap once, sharply. A fast "ping-ping-ping" is a flutter echo between two bare parallel surfaces; a long smear is a room with too little absorption.
Curtains, rugs and sofas work well above about 1 kHz and much less below it — so a furnished room can go quiet in the treble while voices still ring on. The cure there is thickness, not more of the same: 10 cm of mineral wool, or 5 cm held 5 cm off the wall, does what another curtain can't.
Antinodal does all of this in five minutes — and measures what you can't.
It finds the bass nulls across your whole floor, the exact reflection points on every wall, which speaker reaches you first to the centimetre, and how long your room rings band by band. Then it tells you the five things that will make the biggest difference.