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System Setup Suggestions

How you set your system up will greatly affect its performance. This section contains setup considerations and techniques for realizing your system's maximum potential.

Room Design and Acoustic Treatments

The acoustics of your room will heavily influence the sound. Articles in the Room Design section of our website expound on the importance of room dimensions, room construction, and acoustic treatments. The acoustic treatments article discusses the value of controlling bass room resonances, slap echo, and early specular reflections.

System Break-in

Very often new components will improve considerably with use. The break-in period varies considerably depending upon the product -- from as little as a hour to as many as hundreds of hours. Your owner's manual may have specific break-in instructions; if so, we suggest that you follow them. You can accelerate the break-in period by playing your system while you're not home, using a tuner or a CD-player set to repeat; just start the system when you leave. Listen periodically to the system and stop the break-in when you notice no further improvement.

For speakers, the volume that you use will be important. For the first few hours, keep the volume low. For the next dozen hours or so, use a moderate volume. From then on, use a higher volume with music containing wide dynamic contrasts. If you are in a hurry, you can accelerate the speakers' break-in with a special procedure:

Rapid Speaker Break-in: Place the two speakers face-to-face. Disconnect one speaker from the amplifier and reconnect it out-of-phase by reversing the speaker wires. The speakers will now cooperate with each other in a push-pull fashion, which and will break in the surrounds on the drivers more quickly.

Bass Reinforcement

Independent of the room dimensions, materials, and resonances, the position of the speakers and the listening position within the room will influence the audio performance in the bass region. This phenomenon is referred to as bass reinforcement.

The wavelength of a sound is inversely proportional to its frequency; lower frequency notes have longer wavelengths. At very low frequencies, the wavelengths are much longer than the distance between the speakers and the walls. The sound radiated from the speakers reflects off the walls and arrives back at the speaker substantially in phase with the original sound. This reinforces the sound wave and increases the efficiency of the speaker at that frequency. As a result, the bass response in the room may be elevated in volume and extended in depth when compared to the response in open space (or a true anechoic chamber).

As the frequency rises, the reflected wave becomes increasingly out of phase with the original wave. This results in cancellation at a certain frequency. This frequency depends solely upon the distance between the speaker and the boundary (wall, floor, ceiling) in question.

All rooms have these effects; they are not a defect of the room or the speaker, but rather an unavoidable consequence of listening in a room. Carefully choosing the distances between the speaker and the room boundaries will minimize the unevenness of the bass reinforcement and cancellation effects. Some speakers designers provide setup recommendations for their speakers in the owner's manual. We suggest that you at least try these recommendations to see if they work well in your room.

For imaging reasons, we recommend that you position the speakers symmetrically so that the left and right speaker are mirror images of each other. As a good rule of thumb, also position the speakers so that the distance between the speakers and the side walls differs from the distance from the back wall by about one third. For example, if the speakers are 6 feet from the side walls, try positioning them 4 feet into the room. Take your measurements from the center of the woofer.

Speaker Toe-In

Toe-in refers to the angle between the speakers main axis and the side walls of the room. A speaker placed squarely in the room, firing directly ahead, has zero degrees of toe-in. For convenience, sometimes toe-in is measured not in degrees, but in percent, with 100% representing a speaker rotated so that it is firing directly at the listening position. The amount of toe-in needed depends upon the particular speaker involved, the geometry of the listening position, and the acoustic treatment in the room.

Experimentation will help you determine the optimal toe-in for your situation. As a starting point, please feel free to contact us with our recommendations; we have a tremendous amount of experience in setting up the speakers that we sell. The owner's manual may also have some concrete recommendations for toe-in (and other setup parameters as well).

When setting the toe-in, focus your attention on the size and position of the images. Generally speaking, smaller, more focused images will require somewhat more toe-in than larger, more fleshed-out images. Let your personal preference be your guide here. Also, rooms with highly reflective side walls may benefit from a setup with somewhat more toe-in, in order to reduce the amplitude of the sound reflected off the sides.

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