Near Field Height

[Cujo]

All great tips again,
I plan a 6x6 cloud over mix postion.
Should I also keep my ears away from 50% of the floor to ceiling?
I have done a search on SBIR and found nothing could you define that and 3pcf?

Sorry if you have gone over this a thousand times before.

The imaging already sounds better in my room.

[knightfly]

Seems like a lot of your questions should have been answered by the link I posted; have you read that yet? Steve

[Cujo]

I skimmed it once, I better read it thoroughly

[Guest]

That advice is fine as far as it goes; there's more to it though (big surprise) - depending on your ceiling height that position might cause problems by placiing the woofer in a null, making the speakers work really hard and STILL not put out the bass they were designed for.

wow interesting way of putting it.

[nathanvacha]

This is kindof an old topic, but i just read through it... and i was thinking: would it be helpful in a room with approx. 8ft. ceilings to place the speakers higher and angle them down? is this an adequate way to counter-act this problem?

[knightfly]

That can work; but it can also introduce OTHER problems, depending on the way you sit, tilt your head, etc - first, neither your ears nor your speakers should be in any peaks or nulls if possible; the only exception to this is from side to side, because if you do NOT sit centered sideways in a symmetrical room you get less than optimal stereo imaging.

This makes it even MORE important to NOT sit in any UN-necessary nulls/peaks, specifically those caused by height or room length. So we need to sit so our ears aren't at even multiples of height, nor are they at even multiples of length, and the same goes for speakers; PLUS, the speakers shouldn't be in any SIDEWAYS nulls/peaks EITHER.

So, it seems as if we could place the speakers high (above room center) and sit low (ears BELOW room center), and fix EVERYTHING, right??

Unfortunately, another problem(s) arises - one, this changes geometry of the sound path and MAY (or may not) cause early reflections off desk, mixer, etc - these will mainly be mid to high frequency problems, causing comb filtering at the mix position.

This can be solved with a little geometry - do a side view of your room, and trace reflections from tweeters to any hard surfaces (desk, console) and see if they get close to where your ears will be; if so, speakers need to move forward or back. (this assumes they are already at correct height) -

This is also ONE of the reasons it's better to place nearfields on STANDS; it puts them further away, and changes geometry so that (usually) first reflections are redirected BEHIND us.

ANOTHER reason the "high/low" placement thing may cause problems - the human Pinna (the part of the ear you see) is shaped that way for a reason; besides collecting sound, it also ATTENUATES off-axis higher frequencies - thought by some to be a hold-over from the "fight or flight" response that's kept humans alive when bigger, meaner things were after them.

The result of this for music mixing - if your speakers are high and your ears are low, unless you LOOK UP at your speakers while mixing you'll hear less treble. This can cause you to overcompensate, making a tinny sounding mix.

If there's no way around having to do this, it helps to be aware of the possible problems; if you think there's not enough "sizzle" in your mix, sit back and look up at your speakers before you reach for that EQ... Steve