7
Initial Placement
While your initial placement for the Presence loudspeakers may not be the sonic best, these speakers are not hyper-sensitive to placement within the
room. Satisfactory room integration is attainable from nearly any position within a room. Nevertheless, you will be rewarded if you work on setting
them up for the best sound. The following details may assist you in the pursuit of texture, tone, and natural stereophonic recreation.
Placement for left / right front: Presence should be placed to work with the natural acoustics of the room rather than ght them. The following basic
points should be followed.
lPresence should point at the listening position.
lWe recommend starting with “toe-in” so each loudspeaker faces the center of the listening area.
lLess toe-in should be tried as a nishing touch on dialing in treble timbre and stereophonic presentation.
lFrom the listening position, Presence must be equidistant for compelling stereo performance.
lThey should not be placed any closer than 3 inches (7.5cm) to any wall.
lWe think a wide spread between speakers is usually better for both music and home theater setups.
Ball-End Feet & Carpet Spikes
Hard surface ball-end feet have been installed in the Presence at the factory. Carpet spikes have been included in the package. Ball-end footers
are designed to be gentle on hard surface ooring but will likely mar ooring if the loudspeaker is slid, we recommend that you lift and move the
loudspeakers to avoid damaging your ooring while positioning.
CAUTIONCAUTION, make sure you’re snaps, jewelry, and belt buckle free when positioning the loudspeakers.
For carpeted oors we recommend that you use the supplied carpet spikes once you have decided where the loudspeakers are going to stand. This
will provide increased support to the loudspeaker, allowing it to couple with the structure of the oor and not wobble about. Carpet spikes will also
eliminate permanent carpet impression.
Carpet or hard surface, we recommend that you level the loudspeakers by adjusting the spike or ball-end studs. Each loudspeaker should stand
straight and level .
Placement Fine Tuning
Perhaps it has been the lack of skilled engineers, maybe audiophiles at large have lacked discipline; for whatever reason the current consumer
playback world is lost in its conception of acoustics and the nature of sound—much has been written in consumer magazines but little of it is
genuine. Original recommended works on the subject include: Music, Physics and Engineering (formerly titled Musical Engineering) by Harry F.
Olson, Science & Music by Sir James Jeans, Fundamentals Of Musical Acoustics by Arthur H. Benade, Fundamentals Of Acoustics by Lawrence E.
Kinsler, Austin R. Frey, Alan B. Coppens and James V. Sanders. There are several other good sources of researched data; these represent a good cross-
section.
The following technique is Zu Presence specic. It addresses the loudspeaker’s relationship with the room and works for both 2-channel and multi-
channel setups. How and where the loudspeakers excite the room and how the room reacts is relative to the type and source of excitation and
room reactance—a function of boundaries (walls, oors, etc.), boundary properties (mass, compliance, Q, damping, texture and structure), area
impedances (shape, volume), diusion and absorption (furnishings, people, ooring, etc.), source and type of wave excitation (loudspeaker design
and placement), resonators (closets, forced air ducting, hallways, etc.), even atmospheric pressure and humidity, though very minor, will inuence
sound. While the above are beyond the scope of this guidebook, the recommendations and listed books will start you down the right path. And just
to drive it home, before you trust another modern work relative to playback and acoustics please research the above listed references!
With your loudspeakers positioned for visual appeal, livability and delity, you can now begin ne-tuning. This involves three major steps. In
sequence they are bass, mids and treble. If you can’t ne-tune your system within an evening please contact us or your local pro audio, or hi shop,
asking if the resident sound guy is available for hire. They work pretty cheap and more often than not, they know what they are doing. Note, hi or
pro guy, if they don’t know who Harry Olson is, don’t hire ‘em.
Anyway, likely you will have one loudspeaker that is framed with less wall space, this is the loudspeaker you will ne-tune and then simply mirror the
other. Select recordings with large amounts of sustained low frequency information; dramatic pipe organ and dance music work as do test recordings
that have warbled low frequency tracks (50 - 100 Hz range). Note that steady state sine, triangle and square wave signal prove very dicult to
interpret. Bass information with some transient content will enable the listener to make fast work of ne-tuning. With the loudspeaker playing at a
moderate level, (only the “tuning loudspeaker” should be on) walk over and kneel down next to it. Kneeling will put your head in the seated listening
horizontal plane and allow you to hear how the loudspeaker integrates with the room. Now move your head to either side of, and back and forth of
the loudspeaker, in big dramatic sweeps, after all, it’s big bass waves we are listening to here. Listen to the delity of the bass, does it sound woolly
and muddy right behind the loudspeaker? Is the bass more dened to the left or right? If the bass sounds better to the left, move the loudspeaker
to this position and then listen again. Remember that moving the loudspeaker also changes how the room reacts. You should only have to move the
loudspeaker two, three or four times to get it right. If you aren’t hearing much, move on.
Midrange & Treble: Once the lower octaves are sounding good, natural, vibrant midrange and treble can now be dialed in. Before you begin I think
it’s important to understand a few concepts. Midrange tuning, while similar to that of bass, is a task of a inches (decimeters) rather than feet (half
