Firstly, this is not an absolute guide… The shape and size of your room, together with working around existing furniture mean that you often have to deviate from these suggestions to get the best results. These are just some best practice ideas to make your setup the best it can be.
I’m also not going to touch on the subject of room acoustics here, as that’s an entire topic to itself and i’ll dedicate more posts to that shortly, but first, lets check that you’ve got as much of the basics covered as possible.
Monitoring “Triangle”
Positioning
The tweeters of your monitors should ideally be positioned in an equilateral triangle with your main listening position, or rather… the imaginary lines should cross just behind where your head would be.
Ideally the tweeters should be at ear height, or at least angled, pointing directly towards your ears at the listening position.
You should angle them in towards the mix position at about a 30 degree angle.
Low Frequency Control
There’s a lot of different opinions about where in the room you should set up your speakers, but what you really do need to remember is that the closer they are to any wall, the more the bass response will be increased.
Many active monitors will have switches to compensate for this, or LF controls on the back to compensate for this effect, the basic rule of thumb is to reduce the LF by 6db for every wall it is next to. It would be ideal to not have them in the corners of the room, as you would want to roll off 12db of the bottom end for a balanced response and not many monitors let you do this amount.
If you can have them more than a couple of feet away from a wall, then you should be able to leave the LF controls flat.
Stands
An ideal home setup would generally be having your speakers on stands just behind your table, desk or console.
Floorstanding Stands with Isolation Platforms
If you do have speakers mounted directly onto your desktop, then the desk would vibrate along with your speakers, essentially making the desk part of the speaker and altering the frequency response of the speakers. This is the same if you have speakers or stands that are directly onto floorboards.
Stands don’t now just put the speakers at the right height, they can also isolate the speakers vibration. Carpet spikes have been trying to do this for years in the hifi world, and certainly trying to minimise contact area between your speakers and what they are sat on is always a good thing.
One way to tackle this effect (if you have solid concrete floors) is to make your stands very heavy and dense, as heavy objects conduct vibrations far less than lightweight ones. Solid concrete breeze block towers will certainly do the job, but might not look as attractive as you may want.
Ideally you would want an isolating device between the speaker and the surface it’s placed on.
Desktop Iso-Acoustics Stands
Foam based isolators are cheap, and are better than nothing, but absorb only some of the vibrations, and of course, the lower the frequency of the sound, the less it absorbs.
Our favourite ones here are currently the Iso-Acoustics range, these use a mix of plastic, rubber and metal poles to absorb the vibrations very effectively across the entire frequency spectrum and can have a very noticeable improvement in the bass and mid range response of speakers. There are both desktop and floorstanding models.
Connections
XLR Cable
Most active monitor speakers have multiple ways of connecting the audio cables to them. The best ones are either XLR or Stereo (TRS) Jack, as these can be “balanced connections” and these will have the lowest noise.
If your output device also has a balanced output
1/4″ TRS Jack
(it won’t work if its not), then it will send two separate versions of the same signal to the speaker (called hot and cold). The cold signal will be the exact opposite of the hot, 180 degrees out of phase.
If any noise is picked up on the cable run, it would be picked up on both lines equally, so when the signal enters the receiving device (in this case the speaker) it inverts the cold line, making the original signal back in phase, but the noise is now 180 degrees out of phase and cancels itself out.
Gain Staging.
Poor gain staging of your monitor chain will result in excessive hiss and noise from your speakers, just follow this simple guide to get the best from your speakers.
Set your monitor output in your DAW to -1dB.
You shouldn’t be clipping your monitor output in your DAW, but it should be peaking as loud as possible without going over.
To set your best monitoring range, set your interface output volume knob or monitor controller to its maximum setting and then adjust the volume control on your monitors until they are the loudest you would ever want them to be. Then just turn your interface or monitor controller back down to normal working levels.
This will give you both the best signal to noise level possible, but also the most useful gain control.