Hey everybody, I'm Mark Edward Lewis and we're sitting here in Cinema Sound
Studio B. I want to talk to you today about speaker placement. Specifically,
about speakers being upside down or sideways. I've got here the JBL 305 mark
2--you know--pretty great speaker: two-way woofer and tweeter up here. You know the
standard way to do it is just to sit it like this: with the woofer on the bottom
and the tweeter on the top and angle it so that it's--you know--to point it
directly at you the best way possible because high frequencies are very
directional. But because high frequencies are so incredibly directional we want to
make sure that this tweeter is actually pointed at your ears. Not your neck, not
your head, but your ears. And sometimes depending on the height of the stand or
the platform you have this on, you may need to change the attitude of this
speaker. In Studio B, if you look behind me you'll see that these actually are
upside-down. That's because the speaker stands and the coefficient of that
height with the coefficient of the chair that the mixing position is in, is such
that the tweeter needs to be on the bottom--as close to the stand as possible--
so that this is pointed directly at the users head. Now I suppose if I were six-
foot-seven or six-foot-eight then we'd be able to do this. But with this the way
it is, it would shoot over my head and I'd be adding an inadvertent amount of
high frequencies to the mixes that isn't really--you know--it's never going to
translate, because it'll sound great to me here, but really most of the high
frequencies are going over my head. The converse is also true. If you have it too
low, the high frequencies will hit you in the chest and again you're turning them
up too loud, so that when you go to other systems--or whatever--it's gonna sound
really...really--you know--high frequency and awful. The mistake that a lot of
people make is putting them..."Well I don't need it high, I don't need it upside down,
I need it sort of in the middle." There's a problem with putting it in the middle,
and I'm gonna use this clip from the Cinema Sound M-Zed Pro-Education to show
you how...why we never want to put speakers on their
sides: because of phase and delay issues. So here we have a consumer-grade 3-way
speaker. You've got a tweeter, a mid-range, and then a woofer, and what's interesting
is this is about the size--or could be easily--of a subwoofer, and that the
difference is it doesn't have much throw. In other words, it can't move very far.
A subwoofer has to move really, really far. So this is just a woofer...might go down to...
I don't know, 60 Hertz maybe 55 something like that. Now check this out! We talked
about how important it is to have the same level, the same actual physical
distance of all drivers to you the listener. And if you're listening too
high compared to these speakers, you're gonna hear this speaker before you hear
this one or vice versa. Side to side--not that much of the deal...
I'm just gonna move it front to back, and see if you can notice anything about phase
or weird sounding-ness.
So hopefully this shows you why it's important to either have them vertically
upside down or vertically horizontal, but never ever sideways like this. I mean you
can probably have it straight at you like that--and the only speaker that
you'll ever get to do that with is your center channel--but all the rest are
going to be at some angle like this, and you're gonna have a delay issue between
your tweeter and your woofer--to say nothing of what it'll be like if you
have a 3-way speaker. Obviously, single speakers probably not a big deal. But who
wants to listen on single speakers? They're gonna sound terrible anyway.
Definitely come and join us if you're a Cinema Sound member on the secret
Facebook group that we have. We'd love to have you. Lots of action, lots of
questions being answered there, and also be sure to join us on Thursday nights at
6 p.m. Pacific for the Cinema Sound Symposium, where we're going through the
entire M Zed Pro-Education from Cinema Sound. Make sure you jump on and we'd
love to see you there. Until then we'll see you in the mix.