This is one of the questions that we get most often, and it'll probably not be the last time. “How much space should I leave between my speakers and the back wall?” Basically, it depends on the room just as much as the speaker itself. So in reality, you have to experiment a little bit with this. What happens is, if you put the speaker closer to the wall... it will add some more bass. So when the sound is dispersed from the speaker, the bass frequencies are actually dispersed out in all directions, like a sphere from the loudspeaker. So it'll travel out in all directions, including backwards. And the higher frequencies is only going forward. So if you put the speaker closer to the wall, you're going to increase the refelctions of the low frequencies from the back of the speaker. So you have a balance between how close do you want it to be on the wall, to have a proper impact in the bass, or to get it further out? Then you have less reflections from the wall, but you also might have to lean sound with too little bass. So you kind of have to experiment with that. What I generally recommend is: start by putting the speakers really close to the wall, which is very likely not to be the best case. And then gradually moving out, listen to some music that has some variables and tuneful bass. Figure out when does it sound best. So as you move gradually outwards, you'll be able to hear that it becomes better. Sound is more easy to follow; the bass notes and things like this, so once it sounds better and better, just keep increasing it until at some point it's going to be worse. The bass is going to be kind of missing in the music. So then, you know to go backwards a little bit. That's the easiest approach to reaching the optimal point. Then you have some theoretical approaches to the distance between the speaker and the wall. And just to touch on that a little bit... One of the things that led us here is something called SBIR, which is speaker boundary interference response. And what that means is the sound coming from the back of the speaker hits the wall and is then reflected back. That sound is delayed when it reaches the speaker again. So that gets mixed with the sound directly from the speaker. So depending on the wavelength, depending on the frequency of that sound, it might actually cancel out some of the sound from the speaker. So from the speaker to you, some of the sound will be missing, so to say. And the distance directly affects which frequencies are affected and how much they're affected. So that's the technical reason that it's important to have the right distance to the wall. And again, that can be calculated. But it's really more efficient in the real world to do it by ear, in my experience. Because the real world never really matches up with the calculations, because you also have to take into account the distance to the sidewalls and floors and ceilings and listening position and all of that. Another thing that's related to this is: how about the port placement of the speaker? Sometimes this question is really focused on the placement of the port of the speaker. The port is typically on the back. So should I move the speaker out from the wall because the port is on the back? So sometimes this question is actually based in port placement. People want to know, does the port placement affect how close my speaker is to the wall? And actually, it isn't that important, but I'm going to cover that in a future episode of Ask the Expert.