Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Room Size versus Listening Distance

I'm a big believer that listening distance matters most for everything but the sub. It gets tricky to discuss though, since in a smaller room there is a credible view that at a relatively short distance the accumulated reflections become the dominant factor and that distance becomes irrelevant.

The point is, I think, that in a large room at short distances the reflections are not as big a factor (since the walls are simply further away) so that the straight-line distance to the speaker is the primary determinant of how much energy the speaker needs to kick out to give you the desired SPL. The key issue is how much air the speaker can move, I think, more than the actual size of the speakers -- for example the M40s in my living room (4200 ft3, opening into another ~8000 ft3) sound wonderful but I wouldn't want to try and "rock the house" with them since they only have a single small woofer and tweeter.