For the home theater buffs among you, there’s few things better than figuring out the ideal speaker placement for your living room. Whether you’re building your dream movie-watching setup, a hi-fi buff finding out the best speaker placement for your favorite records, or just someone who needs to play video games as loud as possible, setting up a sound system can be an adventure all on its own. One of the biggest headaches involved with sound systems, however, is figuring out where to put them! We don’t get too involved in the science behind it all, but the ideal speaker placement requires a lot of forethought, and more than a little space in your living room. One of the fastest ways to achieve this ideal placement is through the use of floating home shelves! Floating shelves are a type of home wall shelves that are designed to be a little more low-profile while being just as easy to install. These shelves can be ideal for home speaker placement due to their versatility, and can support all but the heaviest speakers - and those should probably stay on the ground anyway!

Mounting Speakers with Floating Shelves

The first step would be to take stock of your current setup. Are you only using the smaller, wall-mounted speakers or do you need to incorporate a larger, floor-mounted subwoofer alongside them? A lot of speaker setups incorporate larger ‘bookshelf speakers’ for the lower frequencies, and the position of these speakers should be taken into consideration when placing the rest of your shelves. When arranging the wall shelves, one thing to look out for is sound reflection. Your ears don’t just hear the sound from the speakers - they can also pick up reflections of sound from off the walls or other things in your living room. A good way to avoid this is to mount a pair of speakers on the wall facing wherever you sit, to reduce reflections and find the aural “sweet spot” where the sound quality is best. The other big thing to keep in mind is wire positioning. Die-hard audiophiles all know that you need an old-fashioned, hardwired cable to get the best sound quality from your speakers, but those speakers can really get in the way of organizing your shelves. Take careful measurements of how long your speakers are and keep these numbers in mind when deciding on shelf placement. However long your speakers are, aiming for ear level is crucial for keeping your speakers sounding their best. Too high and you’ll miss certain frequencies, too low and they may blend into your floor-mounted speakers, or just get lost among the couch and carpeting - find the “just right” height and your speakers will sound better than ever before. These are only a few general rules for organizing speakers - so long as it sounds good to you and doesn’t take up a ton of space, you should be all set!