Mixing Position and Speaker Placement: Get the Most From Your Speakers

The very first thing I needed to do when getting set up in my new recording space was to find the ideal mixing position. In this post, I’ll walk you through why and how I went about it. The process doesn’t require any special tools, just patience and a good ear. Read on and maybe you can try it for yourself and get better sound out of your own speakers!

The shape and size of a room determines its acoustic properties; there will be locations in a room where certain frequencies will either resonate and get louder, or cancel each other out and almost disappear. The exact spot where you mix and listen to music should be as balanced as possible across the frequency spectrum. If you sit in a “null” spot where the bass is canceled out, you may be tempted to crank the bass in your mix in order to hear it. On the other hand, if you mix in a boomy, bass-heavy spot, you will want to take too much bass out of your mix. 

Common practice is to set up your speakers pointing down the longer dimension of your room, if there is one. This was how I already planned on setting up in this room, so that wasn’t a problem. In order to find the sweet spot for mixing, I put one speaker directly in the corner which causes a lot of bass to be amplified in the room. Note, I only listened through one speaker at this point. Having only one sound source ensures that there isn’t any phase cancellation between two speakers - we want to hear how the room sounds, not the speakers. While one speaker played in the corner, I walked very slowly back and forth along the centerline of the room, focusing all my attention on the kick and bass in the tracks. Higher frequencies aren’t nearly as problematic in room acoustics, so right now I’m only prioritizing finding the best location for the bass. It’s tempting to try to find the spot that has the loudest booming bass, but keep in mind this might be an unnaturally hyped-up resonant frequency in that one spot. So make sure to listen for the bass lines to be even across the higher and lower notes. When I did this, I found a really nice sounding location but it was about halfway into the room. Since I didn’t want to set my computer and speakers up to be centered in this room, I had to look for the next best sounding spot. Once I found this spot, about 6 feet from the front wall, I started pulling the speaker out from the corner.

 I determined that pulling the speaker in from the side wall roughly ¼ of the width of the room sounded pretty good. This was all done by ear and deciding what I thought sounded best. After figuring out the width of the speakers, I had to find the best distance from the front wall. This ended up being another compromise. You can greatly improve the clarity and stereo imaging you hear from your speakers if you pull them a few feet away from the wall, but I don’t have that kind of space to work with. My speakers are closed-back and have a front-facing bass port, so they don’t suffer from being close to the front wall as much as other speakers do. I ended up placing them so the front face is about 2 feet from the wall.

Sudio speakers placed with the front face 19" from the front wall.

You’ll often hear that you should create an equilateral triangle between the two speakers and the listener. This can be a good rule of thumb to follow, but it doesn’t take into consideration how the room reacts to the speakers, and it doesn’t say where in the room to place the equilateral triangle. Out of curiosity, when I finished finding the best sounding placements for the speakers and my seat, I measured the distances between the two speakers and my head, and it turned out to be almost exactly an equilateral triangle! Another thing I’m doing differently this time is I’m pointing the two speakers slightly behind my listening position. This accomplishes two main things. First, I’ve decided I prefer how the bass sounds just a little bit further back from where I’m normally sitting at my computer. When I want to listen critically to the bass, I can move my seat back a few inches to where the speakers are pointing. Otherwise, for the majority of the time, it sounds fine where I’m sitting - a few inches forward at the computer. Pointing the speakers just behind my head also helps soften the high end just a little bit. This can help battle ear fatigue from critical listening for extended periods of time. Also, when I scoot back a bit to better hear the bass, I’ll have the speakers pointing directly at me, which will make that high end a little clearer so the added bass doesn’t distract from the high end. I still have to experiment with this and see how I like it, but I think this will help me get the most out of my mixing position.

Picture of studio speaker placement, taken from just behind the listening position.

Now that I have my listening position and speaker placement worked out, I can start fine tuning the room with acoustic treatment. I plan to cover that process in detail in a future blog post, so keep an eye out for that!