With few exceptions, I help people's home systems sound better by pulling their speakers away from the wall behind them. It's a simple tweak and one that almost always works because living rooms and spouses are generally not happy with large boxes sitting out in the open.
The problem stems from an odd collection of disagreeing needs: homeowners have to live in their listening spaces and speaker designers don't.
Speaker designers work in an ideal vacuum because they cannot know the environment their products will eventually live. This situation creates the great divide between the theoretical and the practical.
Unlike electronics, which are placement agnostic, speakers are integral to the rooms they play in. This sticky wicket of a problem has generated an entire industry built around taming the room to accommodate the speakers within them.
I think we can do better.
