Stable, 3-dimensional stereo imaging | Wisdom Wands SC-1 manual

Main Speaker Placement

benefit (when done properly) of providing outstanding acoustic isolation from adjacent spaces as well as superb bass reproduction. This approach goes well beyond the scope of an owner’s manual; if you are interested, you should con- tact a professional acoustician who has specialized in domestic listening room design.

Within the room itself, placement of the speakers and the listener will have a profound effect on the performance of the system, particularly below 300 Hz or so. There is no “perfect” position that will solve all problems, but finding the best compromise will make it easier to solve the remaining problems with the SC-1.

Your Wisdom Audio dealer can help you with optimizing your speaker place- ment, which is never quite as simple as it seems it should be. The characteristics you should listen for are several:

•Stable, 3-dimensional stereo imaging

This usually requires reasonable symmetry within the room, and a bit of space between the speakers and adjacent side walls (to minimize the adverse effects of early first reflections). Mono (correlated) pink noise can help here, though it does not replace listening to music. With pink noise playing in both speakers, you should hear a tightly-defined little “ball” of pink noise floating in space exactly halfway between the speakers.

•Smooth, consistent bass

Oft-cited rules of thumb for smoother bass reproduction include both “placing the speakers at different distances from the side walls vs. the wall behind them,” and “placing them at ‘odd frac- tions’ of the room’s dimensions” (e.g., fractions in which the denominator is an odd number, like 1⁄3, 2⁄5, 2⁄7, etc.). But nothing replaces your experience in your room, combined with your deal- er’s experience in a variety of rooms. Playing pink noise through the woofer sections of your Wisdom Audio speakers (with the mi- crophone at the listening position, and prior to doing any equal- ization) and watching the results on a Real Time Analyzer (RTA) will let you see the results of your labors.

•Center channel height

Once you have a solid stereo image up front (when listening only to the Left and the Right speakers), you need a center channel speaker for multichannel reproduction. It should be centered be- tween the Left and Right, and centered on the screen’s location, preferably at the same height as the Left and Right speakers. This presents an obvious problem: you cannot place a speaker in front of your television screen. One solution is to locate it behind an acoustically transparent front projection screen. Apart from such an arrangement, try to minimize the change in image height as a sound is panned across the front stage.

•Surround channel geometry

In a 5.x channel system, the surround should be placed either di- rectly to the sides of or slightly behind the listening area (90°–115° from the center channel, as seen from above). In a 7.x system, the surround speakers should be closer to 90° from the center speak- er, and the surround back speakers should be at approximately 130°–150° from the center speaker. This conforms to industry standards, and ensures that you hear what was intended from a spatial placement point of view. (Too often, the surround speakers