Are monitors alright on their sides?

[LooneyTunez]

The real reason why most speakers should not be placed on their sides is because of the comb filtering effects it can cause.

If you lay a vertically designed speaker on it's side, the sound produced by one driver has to travel through the other driver's path before it gets to you. This can cause all sorts of inconsistencies in the percieved frequency response of that speaker. This will be the case with just about any speaker where the tweeter and woofer are aligned. Horizontally designed speakers will usually have the tweeter offset from the woofer (either above or below).

There is some degree of comb filtering in a vertically designed/placed speaker as well, but human hearing is much less perceptive to this in the vertical plane versus horizontal.

Hope this helps.

 

[barefoot]

Yeah, LT has it right for the most part.

Since the woofer and tweeter are separated by a given distance, they create an acoustic interference pattern in the crossover region where they're both producing the same frequencies. Speakers are typically designed such that the woofer and tweeter properly interfere with one another when your ears are positioned on axis with the tweeter. If you move more than a few degrees above or below the tweeter axis, you start getting comb filtering (frequency response ripples) like LT mentioned because the relative distance from your ears to the woofer and tweeter changes. Moving horizontally off axis doesn't have as much effect because the relative distance to the woofer and tweeter is fairly constant.

The reason you want to keep your speakers vertical is the same reason why your ears are mounted on the sides of your head rather than the top and bottom. We are terrestrial beings. We move a lot more in the horizontal plane than we do the vertical plane. Therefore, you want to situate the speakers so that moving around horizontally causes the least amount of response disturbance possible.

Thomas

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Thomas Barefoot
Barefoot Sound LLC.
Recording Monitors