Engineers rely on studio monitors for accurately representing their mixes for the general public.

Things to consider when placing studio monitors?

1. secondary reflections off the walls, ceiling & floor.
2. secondary reflections caused by your furniture (console / desk / etc…)
3. locating monitors up against a wall or in a corner will add low end
4. locating monitors in non symmetrical locations (one in a corner / one along a wall) will create anamolies in the stereo image.

When it comes to accurate reproduction of an audio signal thru the air, reflections are bad. When it comes to making mixing decisions, the better the phase & frequency response of the monitoring system, the better one knows they can trust their mixing decisions will translate universally to the average playback system (car stereo, home stereo, Ipod, Iphone, etc…)

One thing is assured. Any speaker placed in a acoustic space will interact with the space. At worst, this interaction will cause frequency imbalances & reflections that smear the time domain information. At best, the engineer will still have to pay close attention to placement, height & reflections. In live audio it is now common practice to have a multichannel DSP for system processing & frequency response correction. It only seems logical that the same should be true for studio reference monitors but I am unaware of this as a generally accepted practice. Regardless, I would suggest that studio reference monitors should be corrected with DSP since the laws of physics don’t change just because your purpose is different. Maybe some day a DAW (digital audio workstation) will include master buss processing to correct reference monitors for frequency response. Better to correct the speakers once & maintain that correction than to try to fix the frequency imbalance per channel.

Likely the most popular studio reference monitor of all time was the Yamaha NS-10.