Whether you are designing a PA for a permanent installation or using the same PA day after day for temporary sound purposes, there is probably nothing more important than how and where you place your speakers. This includes the physical location of the speaker / speakers and how they are splayed and aimed.

In the real estate industry, the (3) most important factors to consider when purchasing a piece of property (with or without a building on it ) are LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION.

The same thing is true for speaker placement. One of the main reasons I put this website together was because I continually see audio engineers fail to follow the basic principles of speaker placement and speaker combining. There is a right way and a wrong way to do this and if you’re going to spend the money on the gear, you owe it to your audience and your clients to learn how to locate and manage your speakers. All of them.

When it comes to speaker placement, splaying and combining, Success is NOT an accident. There is no point in beginning the measurement and tuning process IF your speakers aren’t properly located and combined.

How do you know?

The shortest path to knowing is to read documents created by the fore fathers of this industry. Specifically, Bob McCarthy’s “Sound Systems – Design and Optimization”.

A spoiler alert. There is nothing simple about this matter. I’ve been studying sound system design and optimization for over 5 years and I still have a long way to go. Why do it at all? Because we don’t have a choice. If you use speakers, you are shorting your earning potential and your clients if you don’t know at least the basics about how speakers interact with a room and each other.