Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Speaker placement and settings

Hi All

I am just moving my Meridian setup into its new listening room on my house build. The room is open plan lounge kitchen dinner about 8m x 11m. The living space being about 8m square with a vaulted ceiling (3.5m).

I have a pair of DSP5200SL speakers connected to a 218 and orginal Sonos connect for control. I may also connect to my Samsung TV via Optical but not certain.

I don't have much furniture in the room yet so the sound is not great, I can't find anything to suggest the best placement for the speakers and settings for the 218.

Are there any rough recommendations for the best results?
Speakers close to the rear wall or an optimal distance out (if so what do I select in the audio settings on the 218?)
Distance appart and distance to a good listening position?

I know this all varies a lot between room shapes and construction but its not so easy to move these speakers and my furniture about.

Many Thanks
IAn

It would be interesting to know more about your floor.

IMHO it is best to start with consideration of the floor construction, and coverings.

5200's of all iterations in my experience function very favourably placed on carpets and decent underlay.

Just my POV

Hector

I had 12 inches of space behind my 6ks and and about 18 inches to the side walls. Sounded great but wanted to tame some bass, so moved them into the room by about 6 inches in both directions.
Made quite a difference. So thought can this keep getting better?
Settled on speaker fronts being just over a meter out into the room from front and side walls.
What a difference. Bass tightened up. No boominess. Mids opened up massively. Airy. Far more detailed.
Get your speakers as far out into the room as you possibly, comfortably can. You won't regret it

Good luck

Nick

It’s not possible to suggest due to lots of variable's but there is al lot of info about placement. This is an example thats not to complicated.

It’s a case of trial and error. If you have a hard floor you could place the speakers on a towel which makes it possible to slide them more easily true the room.This helps determine the approximate place where they sound best.

After that I use 2 Ikea KOLON floor protectors on those spots, 120x100 cm marked 30 x 30 squares on them with masking tape to do some fine tuning. The squares make it easier to put the speakers symmetrical to the sweet spot. A few inches can make a big difference.

Hi Hector
The floor is a 40mm screed with underfloor heating over 100mm Celotex and block and beam, it will have an LVT Karndean flooring added soon. I wanted the walls in soldi plaster but we ended up with dot and dab which I know can resonate. The ceiling is insulated plasterboard which is unlikely to resonate.

We will have a sofa and chairs in the way of soft furnishing. Windows will have roller blinds. One end of the room is all glass so its far from perfect as a listening room.

It’s all just trial and error to really get the best sound. There are simply too many variables for rules. What I will say is that getting the placement right is absolutely transformative of the sound, so it’s completely worth all the effort.

It might help to be systematic - change one parameter at a time (speaker position or listening position). Also, within speaker placement, change distance from front wall and when that’s optimal, distance from side walls/apart, etc. It’s complex and will take you a while to get dialled in. It helps to have someone else sometimes.

Usually the last step is to angle the speakers inwards towards the listening position until you get the smoothest tonal balance and stereo image.

Don’t assume anything. Sometimes speakers and/or listening position are best far from boundaries, sometimes up-close (I’ve learned this from several dealer’s listening rooms and the way they are set up). Two of the demo rooms which sound best to me have the listening couch up next to the back wall (which in theory is a no-no) and one has the speakers firing across the short dimension of the room as well, which also should be a no-no, but sounds fantastic.

Meridian speakers cope better than most with hard flooring and varied room construction, in my experience they are very consistent and forgiving, room to room, compared to other designs. You can also use the bass and treble tilt, etc., to sculpt the sound a bit after you find the best locations.

Do you have the opportunity for any bookshelves or any curtaining which could be pulled into place, even just while listening, to mitigate that glass wall?

We will have roller blinds on the doors but probably not curtains. I think I need to wait until we have the final furniture installed and then start to experiment.

Lots of sound advice (pun intended) above.

I'd just add that as well as speaker position, the listening position is just as important.

Often you have less flexibility with that but, in my experience, the distance from back wall to listening position is just as important as speaker placement.

Same is true of side walls but often the listening position is already mid-room laterally.

With glass (windows/doors) behind for the OP that will be more so as it is hard to tame the reflections off the boundary behind the listener.

I've tackled this with great results putting acoustics traps behind the listener. But I know that is super hard with glass (you have to innovate).

It's worth testing this by simply moving forward and backward from the listening spot as the music is playing. Note how the balance of the sound changes as you move into peaks and nulls created by the reflections of the back wall.

Somewhere will be a sweetspot for a given speaker placement. As you tweak the speaker placement the sweetspot moves.

It's tricky but trial and error wins.

HTTH

Hi IAn,

We moved to a new place last year and I used these schematics (see below) to determine the position of my speakers ... and needed to make a small adjustment to get my wife to accept it 😎



My listening position follows from



My living room is 520 cm wide and the speakers are 177 cm from the rear wall (instead of the suggested 232 cm) and 144 cm from the side walls. It sounds absolutely amazing, moving to our current condo proved to be the best upgrade to my system (and the most expensive too 😂).

Still experimenting with the toe-in.

Enjoy,

Edwin
[Both pictures taken from www.fransvaneeckhout.be]

Might I suggest looking


Jim Smith tips from his book "Get better sound".

One thing I tried and got great results with is the calculation -- speaker distance tweeter to tweeter is .83 * listener seating position to speaker.