Add an Extra Pair of Ears
David Hicks | Published on 9/30/2025
The adage that two heads are better than one also applies when it comes to optimizing your home stereo. I say this for no other reason than four ears are better than two. Perhaps that is because my brain, like your brain, is so good at filling in the missing information as I adapt to the sounds I regularly listen to? Oh, and motivation. I find the task of fully optimizing the sound in my listening spaces to be one that always sits at the bottom of my to-do list. This is where scheduling a specific time to work with a friend, audio club member, or your spouse can be helpful.
True, like Stirling Trayle, you could be a one-man show and do all of this optimization at home by yourself. But I think part of the joy of owning a collection of great gear comes when we can share the experience with others- your audiophile pals- who actually appreciate listening to great-sounding stereo reproduction. And, optimizing your system is work. Mr. Trayle can spend upwards of 20+ hours on the process. Sharing the workload should help you cut the time down significantly. And, turning your stereo system from "good enough" into “wow” is much more fun when the process is collaborative. I will also suggest that the process should be reciprocal. Get someone to help you for a specified period of time, and return the favor by helping them optimize their system on another day.
Your listening space is the most critical component of your audio system. Your living room has furniture, windows, and walls that create complex reflections and absorption patterns. These acoustic properties will muddy the bass, distort high frequencies, and destroy the precise imaging that makes a live recording sound real. How your speakers are placed in your room is the most primary thing you can adjust to improve the sound of your system and optimize your listening enjoyment.
You should start with the basics. A general rule of thumb is to create an equilateral triangle between your speakers and your primary listening position. Beyond this starting point, you can find numerous speaker placement videos on the Internet, as well as hundreds of articles and entire books on the subject. The most well-known of these is probably Floyd E Tools, Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms. You can even grab this as a free PDF download.
And, while you don’t need to understand the science behind your audio experience, or read all 500+ pages of Mr. Toole’s book to improve the sound in your room, setting up a stereo to get the best possible sound in your home can be described as a bit of an art form and is rarely a simple task. While you might have invested in some nice equipment, there is more involved than just plugging things in. But fine-tuning your stereo within your listening space can yield more rewards than doubling or tripling your audiophile budget. And since you’ve already spent a bunch of money on your gear, you might as well give it the best shot at sounding worth all that money.
Whether your room is large, small, or in between, there are speaker placement strategies for you. One takeaway, for me, has been that small differences in placement often make big differences in how great your system sounds. Start by having a friend sit in the "sweet spot" and listen while you move the speakers left and right and up and back, inch by inch, or millimeter by millimeter. When you find the placement that gives you the best imaging and detail, mark the placement with a little of the blue painters tape for easy reference in the future.
If your system includes a subwoofer, the placement is critical for accurate low-frequency reproduction. A technique known as the "subwoofer crawl" is a great way to get reacquainted with your first method of locomotion. Place the subwoofer in your listening chair, then crawl around the room while you play a bass-heavy track. When you find the spot where the bass sounds most balanced and powerful, that's where the subwoofer belongs. This method costs you nothing to try and can yield “big bass” results. Alternatively, you could purchase a “Swarm” of subwoofers and go down that route.
Next, you could tackle your room acoustics. Your room's hard surfaces, bare walls, your ceiling, and floors bounce sound waves around, creating echoes that blur the audio. A friend can help you identify these "first reflection points." While you are sitting in the sweet spot, have your assistant hold a mirror along the side walls. When you can see the drivers in your speaker reflected in the mirror, you have located a first reflection point that should benefit from some acoustical treatment. By placing acoustic panels, or even a curtain, over the first reflection points, you should notice a difference as the panels absorb errant reflections and the sound clarity increases. Placing a rug on the floor between you and the speakers can help tame reflections from the floor. There are also panels designed to be placed on ceilings, but you may need to negotiate with your spouse, roommates, or landlords before getting an okay to install these.
Finally, for receivers with automatic room correction software, a friend can assist in the calibration process. Most systems use a microphone to send test tones and measure the room's acoustics. While the system automates much of the process, having a friend run the program while you focus on the details ensures the process is done optimally and the microphone is placed precisely. Even without automated features, a second set of ears is valuable for running through the final equalizer settings, making minor tweaks, and getting the consensus of your four ears on the best sound.
Once you are done with all of the above steps, you can return to your speaker placement and see if there are any new benefits to be had by adjusting the speakers again now that you have fixed your bass and room acoustics problems. Or, you could just enjoy listening to music.
There are many other ways you can optimize the sound of your home system besides adjusting your speaker placement and dealing with your room acoustics, but most of them won’t benefit from having someone over to assist, other than by improving your social connectedness and giving you that extra pair of ears. But, to start, your first step should be to open your contact list, or log in to the Audiophile Foundation forums, and send out a request to schedule time with someone to do an exchange of labor and evaluation. You can thank your friend when you are done, and your brain will thank you for not having to do all that work filling in the previously missing detail while you are listening.