nearly all speakers are all designed to be square from eachother, thats where they design the optimal sound and imaging to be at the listening location. It doesnt make sense to design a pair of speakers that need to be a certain angle, it would impossible to accurately design a stereo image with varying degrees of offset for the consumer. Its all about removing variables from the equation and one of the simplest to deal with and most important ones is the toe angle of a set of speakers (im talking about near fields here, things get much more complex with other speaker set ups)
any sort of toeing in is room dependent and usually trying to fix a speaker placement error as a stop gap.
in my own experience, I’ve played around a lot with angles and found a 90 degree (perpendicular) to really be the absolute sweet spot for imaging. The center channel for me on my set up sounds like its about 2 feet behind the speakers, behind my monitor, hitting perfectly in the center of my brain with stereo sounds dancing on the edges of my ears. Its quite the illusion tbh
in the pic i posted above, the large speakers on the flanks are only turned on when im mixing records, for volume, not imaging for production purposes
and just want to say, that what im saying here is my own experience, im certainly lacking knowledge in a lot of technical aspects here and i could be very wrong, but i think im ‘right’ in my own working knowledge in terms of a simple 2 point near field set up
at the end of the day, its all a moot point in a way if youre just trying to write tunes, your brain is the most important bit of gear
I have a decent amount of releases behind me now from one of my old aliases (fully unknown to dsf) and I wrote all of those tunes on a laptop in my local bar with a pair of hd25iis with shitty bar music playing in the bg
My current set up is purely for my own enjoyment tbh, and my music has only gotten worse the more gear i throw at it haha but much more fun.
Side note: im a gearslut for sure, but i hate propagating the belief that you need any of this hardware bs to make good music.
Your average nearfield monitor will disperse sound equally from the center of its two drivers but there’s a big difference between on- and off axis response. What I learned is that if the center of the driver is not aimed at your ears (or technically about 18" behind your ears), you won’t get the optimal performance from your speakers. You do not aim
them at your ears from the side (like headphones) because this would completely eliminate the sound stage illusion. It might well improve the frequency response as your perceive it though.
As far as I understand it, the stereo image won’t be negatively affected by toe in unless the imaginary lines emitting from the left and right speaker crosses before your ears (like with @Imajika_sound’s krk’s). It will become more narrow though.
Every driver will have a certain angle of dispersion, which is measured at a specific frequency. The higher the frequency, the smaller this angle is. If your speakers are at a 90’ degree angle from the wall and you are about 5 feet away from them, you will miss out
on almost all of the direct sound at about 3.5khz or above, depending on the physical size of the tweeter. Unless the speakers is designed to be flat off axis, but afaik most monitor speakers are designed to be flat on axis, meaning they will have the best response when the measurement mic or your ear is ‘pointed’ at it directly.
So it’s entirely possible that you get the ‘best’ stereo image from your monitors when they are perpendicular to the wall and it will certainly be very wide, but it’s unlikely that you’re getting the best performance when it comes to frequency and relative amplitude. I’d have to hear it in your room though, I’m not trying to say that your setup is wrong and it certainly
doesn’t show in your mixes. They sound on point to me.
*I’m trying to find data on the on- and off axis response of Dynaudio speakers, but I don’t have it handy yet.
(I agree it’s not that important for making some bangin tunes, but I also want to chime in as a sound engineer in this case. Maybe it helps. I refrained from using a load of graphs etc… )
Through university we were always taught to angle near field monitors and there’s a formula to do it.
Google/YouTube ‘how to set up studio monitors’ and there’s thousands of videos from enthusiasts to the manufacturers themselves explainig how to angle correctly and none of them advise what your saying
Yeah. Its an old radiogram that I picked up from a charity shop for £10. Just had to re wire the mains cable to get it working again. Has a record player inside and an 8 track player/recorder.
Don’t think I’ve uploaded my current set up so here ya go. I wanna get rid of the little brown tables my speakers are currently resting on and cop like a two single white shelves from IKEA so it blends in with the kallax. The nice thing is that since I have a loft room now a lot of the sound gets trapped up in the roof so from downstairs/next door you can’t really hear it as much b2b the low ceiling means I can get it rattling quite nicely.
(not pictured: a big fuck off support column which would be right behind you if you were facing the decks)
Re: Monitor placement - @cyclopian was right about the corner being a potential issue in that setup tho, you can get standing resonances and a funky stereo imaging problem.
It’s always helped me to think of sound as basically behaving like water, which it does: it doesn’t propagate in clean straight lines, it oozes and wants to fill all open space at the same general speed until it hits a solid surface and then it ripples back in waves. This is why sound-reinforced rooms that are professionally designed often have bizarre dimensions, to essentially discourage the sound from pooling up in any one place as it would in a symmetrical corner pocket or whatever.
Tl;dr the room’s symmetry, surfaces (like that glass above your head - it reflects different frequencies somewhat than the soft latex paint on yr walls), and overall reflectivity really affect this stuff.
Gearslutz is a pretty good jumping off point if you wanna go deeper.
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