Designing a listening room - speaker position and underfloor cable runs

Posted by: ttarp on 05 January 2016

Hi

I'm renovating my house at the moment - so I have the opportunity to design some features / future proofing into what is my listening room.

The house is a 1900 Victorian terrace house - so walls are pretty thick. And the floor is a suspended timber flooring.

Here's a basic layout of the listening room. Windows / doors / chimney / walls etc. are all fixed. But the hifi / speakers / seating / acoustic room treatments (if required) can all be moved to get the best out of the available space.

Listening room

I've put in where I was thinking to put my hifi rack and front main speakers (currently B&W PM1's).

I've got two main questions:

1) Is the planned speaker placement above (in general terms) the best place for them - or should I be thinking about a different speaker / seating layout?

2) I'd like to add some future proofing for potential home cinema / surround sound upgrade at some point. I don't like the idea of burying fixed speaker cables in walls etc. But I was thinking about having some sort of conduit(e.g. 50mm pond conduit) running under the suspended timber floor. Lengths of conduit from rack to:

so that in the short term I can have the cable going from rack to the right front speaker under the floor out of view. And in the future I can have rear left / right speaker cable runs to the left hand half of the room somewhere without trailing cable in front of door openings etc. And with string / fishing wire in place in the conduits I can change speaker cables if I want to with relative ease.

Any suggestions on the best way to handle such future proofing? And where the best places to have surround sound speakers would be? What about new formats like Dolby Atmos - would more conduit runs to the side / back of the room be advantageous?

 

Regards,

David

Posted on: 06 January 2016 by Innocent Bystander

One good way to determine the best positions for speakers is to put a single speaker at the desired listening position(s), the other disconnected, then move around the room to see where it sounds best (need to rotate the speaker from time to time as you move round to keep the tweeter pointing roughly towards you, although initially you could ignore the variation in treble and focus on the bottom end). Wherever the sound is best, is the best place for a speaker. If you don't end up with locations that allow reasonable positioning for the pair you will of course have to compromise, but that way will help you minimise undesirable room effects.

As for underfloor cables, sounds a great idea provided that you can be certain the speaker positions will remain fixed indefinitely ...and that there won't be a sudden (often female) demand for a change around for variety!

Posted on: 07 January 2016 by ttarp

Thanks for the suggestion.