You may have read many articles about speaker placement. Many of them will suggest (or stipulate, depending on the wording) that you ensure the tweeter of your front speakers is on a horizontal line level with your ears. They often also suggest using three identical speakers at the front. Audiophiles all want excellent sound effects, so you might be considering these. However, if you choose a center speaker, its tweeter is level with your front left and right speakers, which may require you to raise your screen height. But after raising it, you may find it’s too high. How important is the tweeter of your center speaker to the sound effect? Let’s talk about it.
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Actually, it’s not as important as you think
I have clearly said before that I don’t think these “best solutions” are that important. They are indeed good guides, but they generally won’t affect your home theater experience. Having said that, let’s take a closer look at the height of the center channel speaker and the tweeter.
Tonal Matching
There are several factors to consider about the height of the tweeter. First, we will pay attention to tonal matching. This is the premise of how good the effect of sound transmission between speakers is. Your hearing is most sensitive to the tonal changes of the first three speakers, so you definitely want these speakers to have as similar a sound as possible. Fortunately, speaker manufacturers will try their best to ensure that their center speakers match other speakers in tone. They will also ensure that the difference in the height of the tweeter will not have a significant impact on the common sound effects of these speakers.
Secondly, consider the placement. The center speaker is usually placed much lower than the left and right speakers. For your front row seats, this shouldn’t be a problem. The vertical dispersion of the tweeter of most center speakers will be optimized for the listening area of the front row seats. If you find there are tonal issues, you can tilt the center speaker to compensate.
For the second row of seats (if you don’t have a second row of seats, then you don’t need to consider this), the first row of seats will block some of the sound from the center speaker, you may or may not care about this difference. If it makes you uncomfortable or is already very obvious, you can move the center speaker to the top of the screen. Yes, this is definitely not a traditional placement method, but the sound effect will be good.
Conclusion
The “best solutions” are generally designed to guide people to avoid mistakes, but they are not unalterable rules. Their purpose is actually to ensure that users do not place the center speaker on the side of the screen or behind the room (we have seen this situation in some systems). They are not for measuring the height of the tweeter to the millimeter with a ruler. Generally speaking, if it sounds good to your ears, it usually is good, don’t care too much about what is said on the internet.
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