Hi-Fi Best Practices

The world of hi-fi audio is notoriously filled with strong opinions and marketing language, easily making music enjoyment more involved than it needs to be – both mentally and financially. To help you navigate this, we have condensed validated methods and our own experience into the following best practices, putting pleasure and emotion over headaches and gear acquisition syndrome.

Try to get your listening setup as symmetrical as possible: Left and right speakers should be similarly distanced from walls and other obstructions. Place them at least 30 cm from all walls (including the floor), while closer to 90 cm can improve clarity. Placement in corners should be avoided, as it drastically increases bass response and muddies up reproduction.

Tweeters should be at ear level or at least pointing towards your head. You can experiment with toeing them in to dial in center image and sound stage to your liking. Be aware that this is likely to negatively affect other postions in the room.

If you’re aiming for a critical listening position, imagine an equilateral triangle formed by both speakers and the sweet spot. Avoid sitting against back walls, as this will overemphasize bass frequencies. A common recommendation is to sit at 38% of the room length from the front wall. Sitting close to your speakers can reduce the perception of room influences, but may negatively affect stereo imaging. With our DOPPELHORN speakers, we prefer to sit at the triangle’s apex or a bit further back, if the room allows it.

Stands are an often underestimated aspect of any setup. Apart from raising speakers to ear level, good stands minimize resonances, increase clarity, and improve bass response. High mass is a desirable factor here, which rules out regular furniture in many cases. Still, anything is usually better than nothing.

Decoupling speakers from resonant floors with rubber absorbers is recommended – washing machine pads can be a nice budget solution. Feel free to experiment with spikes, but they should mostly be reserved for coupling speakers to immovable masses like concrete floors, or achieving vital stability on carpets.

Your listening environment is just as important as your speakers, if not more. When it comes to room treatment, dealing with the early reflections is key. If possible, put absorbers on the side walls between you and the speakers and consider carpets at the very least. Generally, more thickness means better and lower-reaching absorption – the ubiquitous pyramid style foam is rarely sufficient.

Big bass traps can work wonders with low-end management, but are not a priority in many rooms. Soft furniture, bookshelves, carpets, and curtains are good natural improvements if dedicated products are too invasive.

Some impacts of your environment can hardly be solved with room treatment alone. We strongly recommend to look into room correction using a calibrated microphone and Room EQ Wizard, the go-to free measurement software. If you are willing to spend the money on suitable devices and a license, consider Dirac Live as a more in-depth and automated solution.

In general, correctly setting up digital signal processing will dramatically improve your sound, especially in the lower frequencies, where regular room treatment becomes impractical. Excessive correction should be avoided though, especially in the higher frequencies. Also remember that different positions would require different signal adaptations.

A good source goes a long way. Usually, that means streaming high bitrate files, like from a service tailored to hi‑fi like Tidal or Qobuz. Apple Music still beats Spotify by a long shot, and there are enough other reasons to avoid the latter.

Getting that high res source to your speakers uncompressed is crucial. This eliminates Bluetooth for critical listening – cables are still undefeated, with network streaming on par if done right. When shopping for cables, stay clear of snake oil: As long as they are made of fairly thick high quality copper, protected against interference, and kept as short as practical, you should be good.

In general, it may be true that the weakest link is likely to define your overall experience. Contrary to what a lot of marketing would have you believe though, this is often in the room itself and not in the signal chain. Therefore, it does not make a lot of sense to concern yourself with high-end audio equipment before the environment is taken care of.