Wilson Audio Cub Series 2 - Manual (Page 28)

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HAPES
There are three basic shapes for most rooms: square, rectangular, and L-shaped (see
Figure 2). A perfectly square room is the most difficult room in which to set up speakers be-
cause, by virtue of its shape, square rooms are the perfect medium for building and sustaining
standing waves. Standing waves are pressure waves created by the integration of sound and
opposing, parallel walls which accentuate particular frequencies. They heavily influence the
music played by loudspeakers, greatly diminishing the quality of the listening experience.
Long, narrow rectangular rooms also pose their own special acoustical problems for
speaker setup. They have the ability to set up several standing wave nodes, which will have
different frequency exaggerations depending on where you are sitting. Additionally, these
long rooms are often quite lean in the bass near the center of the room. Rectangular rooms
are still preferred to square rooms because by having two sets of dissimilar length walls,
standing waves are not as strongly reinforced and will dissipate more quickly than in a square
room. In these rooms the preferred speaker position for spatial placement and midrange reso-
lution would be on the longer walls. Bass response would be reinforced, albeit not predict-
ably, by speaker placement on the short walls.
In many cases L-shaped rooms offer the best environment for speaker setup. Ideally
speakers should be set up along the primary (longest) leg of the room. They should fire from
the end of the leg (short wall) toward the bend, or they should be along the longest wall, with
the speaker furthest to the bend being inside of the bend. In this way both speakers are firing
the same distance to the back wall. The asymmetry of the walls in L-shaped rooms resists
the buildup of standing waves.
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