I am about to pull the trigger on a pair of Axiom M60's. With the way my room is setup, I'd have to put the right tower about a foot and a half in front of the end of a long couch. The part of the couch that would be blocking the bottom of the tower is about a little less than knee high. I figure that would cover the bottom 6.5 woofer from view in my listening area, and maybe a portion of the next 6.5 woofer in the array of 4 speakers. Granted they are ported woofers and there is a foot and a half distance between the couch and the tower, will this noticeably change the sound quality at my listening area?
Welcome Soul man,
I think you will be fine. Jack (Ajax)as well as a few others have a similar situation in their rooms, and it work fine. I think as long as the tweetes and midrange have a clear shot at your ears you will be good to go...
Just make sure to try and leave some breathing room behind the speaker and the wall which will also help with the bass...
What are your using for a receiver/amp? Maybe you should get some 80's.
Randy
Let's see, as for as what's behind the right speaker that sits close to the couch is a covered window at an angle. My 2 12 inch subs and my 10 inch sub all sit in a row in the corner of my room. In front of those 3 subs is my LCD screen trying to hide them ;). The new tower's will be to the left and right of the LCD. I mentioned the right tower having a window at an angle behind it, the left tower has a wall at about a 45 degreeish angle behind it. The towers will be about 7 ft apart and my sweet spot for listening about 7-8 feet in front of my screen and dead center of the towers.
I live upstairs in an apartment- landlord directly below and some guy that jokingly asked if it's my cat that turns the music up loud while I'm gone. Landlord is cool though, she tells me when she'll be gone for a day or longer so I can blast my system- except the tenants downstairs and 2 over called the police on me 2x in a week when she was gone due to their apartment rattling and shaking hahaha (his wife came to an agreement to just call me after I invited them over for a UFC fight and beer_- yay).
Yeah so... the 12's only come on occasionaly when the landlord's gone and during the daytime. Wish there was something easy I could do to keep the bass from going straight below.
ANYWAYS.... I think I've got the bass covered which is why I was thinking the M60's... and I have an Onkyo SR-605 to hook em up with. Sorry ...TMI!
Guess I'm just worried that because the 6.5" woofers on the M60's wont be delivering sub-bass most of the time that couch might be throwing off some of the soundwaves on their destination to my sitting area.
The positioning will almost definitely affect the sound in some way, but it doesn't sound like there is a whole lot you can do about it. It is possible that you'd be better off with M22's on stands, especially since you already have subwoofers that you are happy with.
As Randy mentioned, some folks have had to endure suboptimal placement and still really enjoyed their speakers. Others have placed even tower speakers (like the M60) on short risers to mitigate such effects (tarted-up cinder blocks or similar).
If the 605 has Audyssey, that might really help with those placement issues, too.
Have you considered distributing your subs around the room? Co-locating them (as you've done) will maximize the gain, but you might get more even and more pleasant response from experimenting with placement, if that is an option.
I agree about the sub s Tom, for best freq response for movies it is best to move them around the room instead of corner loading.
I have a similar setup where there is a couch 2' in front of my left front speaker. Before volume balancing, the whole image was shifted over to the right side. I found I had to up the left side volume by about 2db to compensate and that centered things more.
I havn't yet checked if/how it affects imaging.
Yeah, the part of the couch that is encroaching is a leg rest add-on, that can be shifted a bit. It is less than knee high in height and made of leather- I really don't think it's going to be that big of an issue. I just checked, and I'd probably have line of sight to a portion of the bottom of the sub.