For a couple of years now I've been optimizing the living room stereo for listening at at the center back of the room. I created a new EQ for this called the "Movie EQ." By necessity it had to be very different from the "Hotseat EQ" for listening closer to the speakers. The Hotseat EQ sounds very boomy in the back of the room. The periphery of the room magnifies the room modes, whereas the center position tend to cancel them out too much.
During this time I haven't bothered to sit at the old hotseat position. I've loathed the idea of dragging my full back recliner back into the center position, especially since I try to show at least one movie a week. I also feared all my optimizing for the back of the room had messed up the sound at the old hotseat, though I retained the original Hotseat EQ for the subs as a separate memory (which can be quickly loaded at pushbutton through my Insteon/Universal Devices home control system). But I have no separate EQ for the midrange which has gone through a lot of changes too, and changes I made to the speaker angling cannot be easily reversed.
I bought a new lightweight low back folding chair for the hotseat position, but hadn't gotten around to trying it yet until the weekend just past. I feared the hotseat position would be all messed up now. But I started trying it on Saturday and then on Sunday found a truly wonderful position, about further 6 inches back from the original hotseat position with the recliner. The new position is probably required because I changed the speaker angling to solidify the center image when listening in the back. The speakers are less canted inwards, which is necessary to get a stable center image at all in the back of the room.
Listening to Citizen Steely Dan Disc 3, in this new hotseat position with a lowback chair, with the hotseat EQ selected, the imaging was Spooky Good. It seemed like Donald Fagan and all the other musicians were right there in front of me. Nothing I've heard elsewhere for a long time has given me that same feeling.
The back of the room "Movie" listening position simply does not and cannot compare with this. A much wider angle between the speakers is required, and there may be other advantages of being close up to the speakers. There is much more direct sound from the speakers. Some have described this as being like "Giant Electrostatic Headphones," even when both speakers are still in front. (There are problems with trying to put both speakers exactly on the sides for stereo, though it can be interesting to play with.)
I do really need to use the hotseat position and EQ for serious listening, which I should do more often.
At the new hotseat, the speakers are about 45 degrees to my left and right on either side. I'm about 5 feet from the plane of the speakers, and they are 5 feet apart. But where to measure this is tricky. If I measured from the middle of the speakers they would be over 6 feet apart, making the angle greater than 45 degrees. But I now believe what is most important is the angle to the closest part of the active membrane, which is only about 2 inches inwards from the outer edge of the speaker towers. That angle is somewhat less than, but still close to 45 degrees. I would guess it is about 40 degrees.
I think the relative speaker position and angling is the number one most important thing in getting Spooky Good Imaging.
It was my friend Tim who originally told me, over 15 years ago, that I should experiment with sitting close to the speakers at a very wide angle, greater than the 30 degrees often suggested. He was right.
He also said the exact position of the speakers and angling might not be the same for every person, because our outer ears are not the same.
If you keep the speakers at a fixed position, you move forwards along the center image to find the place where the center image disappears. That means the angle is too wide and you are too close to the speakers. So then you move backwards until the center image reappears. Around where the center image reappears is the best possible position (or angle between the speakers). Further back, and you get proportionally less direct sound, and the image becomes more diffuse.
That was essentially what I did on Saturday to find the new listening position.
Alternatively, if the listening position is fixed, you could move the speakers in and out from the wall, but for me and my speakers that would be exceedingly challenging for both physical and technical reasons. I have the sub to panel delays dialed in precisely, for one thing, and changing the panel positions would mess that up.
Even if you ultimately end up moving the speakers, it's far easier to experiment by moving yourself closer and farther from them.
In the new position, the center is so perfect and well focused it's clear that my optimizing the speaker position, angling, and delays for the back has not messed them up for the hotseat. If anything, it's far better than it was before now.
I purposefully did not angle the speakers outwards as much for the back as might have been beneficial there, hoping it would not mess them up for the hotseat, and my compromise for the back has indeed worked out perfectly for the front while being "good enough" for the back.
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I think having a lowback chair is good too. When you are sitting in a high back chair, you get near reflections from the back of the chair in your ears. These reflections matter more for imaging than for frequency response, but the frequency response is affected too, as I noticed when doing measurements. I generally have always done my measurements with the chair in place because that is that is what you do when listening.
There's a long story here. When I bought the current chair around 2008 I intended to take it to a furniture repair place and see if I could have the back shortened. I knew this would be expensive but I figured it would be worth it. I never got around to doing that.
The cheap folding chair I bought, which has flexible and ventilated plastic seat and back, is adequate but not as comfortable as I would like. I think I will explore other options, like a director's style chair I already have, or others.
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The Citizen Steely Dan series became available in 1993. While many people think of it as merely a repackaging of Steely Dan albums, it's a whole new mastering that was never heard before. You knew about this if, like me, you read Steely Dan blogs around that time. I also knew something like this was needed for a long time. I don't know how it compares with later Steely Dan CD's, I suspect any high resolution versions were made like this too.
It turns out that one of my best friends was a techie hanger with Steely Dan. He once invited me to the back room for a Steely Dan recording session. I passed on this opportunity around 1976. I had never heard of Steely Dan before. Oops!
Later, I missed a chance to dub a copy of the master tape Steely Dan was circulating among its members. I could not get there on time. I ended up getting a second generation cassette tape dub (using my Nakamichi 600, and copying a tape another friend of mine had made on his Nakamichi 600) and it was a revelation. A whole world of missing detail was on that tape that I never heard from the vinyl records.
(I think I can hear my friends voice on the master tape, and possibly on at least one song on Katy Lied. You can also hear his girlfriend, who had originally been Denny Dias's girlfriend, playing some auxiliary percussion. I could have been there too, dammit.)
For quite awhile I felt this was because tape is superior to vinyl. But that wasn't the reason, The reason was that the circulating master tape lacked the final Dolby processing and reverb that was added to the vinyl pressing (and also to early CD's).
There was a big technical problem here. Steely Dan did all their recordings from at least Katy Lied onwards with dBX. They needed dBX because of the incredible amount of overdubbing they did to make the final albums. But the record companies only used Dolby A when making the final masters to be pressed on vinyl records. So the final albums were retouched with EQ, reverb, and other tricks to sound OK and cover up the error in decoding.
In the Citizen Steely Dan recordings, they went back to the original masters, made with dBX, and decoded them with dBX the way they should have been. Then they added the touch of reverb that may be less heavy handed than in the original vinyl. The result is Steely Dan the way it should have been. And it is incredible. Even better than my second generation tape dubs, which have a lot of tape hiss (my friend and I chose not to use Dolby B at all).
This may be more relevant to some of the discs in the Citizen Steely Dan series than others, but it appears to be especially true for Citizen Steely Dan Disc 3. I'm not sure if all the albums had the processing error. I think it was true for the albums from Katy Lied to Aja. I have never heard the songs on Disk 3 sound as good as they did last Sunday night. It was Spooky.
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Among the changes I made when tuning my system for the back of the room listening position was changing the relative channel levels and delays. I didn't know how this would work for the hotseat position, but I now know it worked out great for that too.
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I worked for 3 months on the subwoofer EQ for the hotseat position in 2024. I ended up making giving it very smooth and nearly flat bass response. Probably for many reasons, it is not as smooth now and could use a bit of rework for the new hotseat position. But still, it is incredibly good. It gives a somewhat higher bass level than I achieved for the Movie EQ in the back.
I wondered how this could be, given that the Hotseat EQ has many more and deeper cuts to eliminate room modes. Well, there are two reasons. The gain compensation for the sub Movie EQ has a -9dB setting for gain compensation. For the Hotseat EQ this is 0dB. I also added a 6dB boost for one frequency range in the Hotseat EQ. Neither of these changes could simply be applied to the Movie EQ, but I might try doing similar things.
