Monitoring 101: Straight or angled to listener?

You should have them pointed at you directly, unless your monitors have an excellent dispersion pattern in the high frequecies (example : D&D 8c). If it's the case, monitors toed out will increase perception of soundstage and alter the phantom center size in relation to the sides information.

My recommendation is to have them pointed right at you or slightly toed out ; because most speakers are very much ultra directional uptop, you don't want to risk hearing a degraded version of the audio.

The angle should have the tweeters meeting just a little behind your head, when in the mix position. I think it's often a 30 degree angle but math was never my strong suit. :-)

It looks like Focal agrees with having them towed in from the picture in the link. 

Mine are slightly in, but not severely. 

The headwall behind (in front of) my mix positioned is angled at the outer edges. So my monitors are parallel (or is it perpendicular??) to them. They are angled. More often than not, the rooms that I've set up or worked in are angled.

And yes to the apex of the triangle hitting at the rear of your head when monitoring in the sweet spot.

Always angled towards me, but that's because I use speakers with waveguides.

Sometimes speakers need to be slightly off axis to sound better though, which is why some are straight.

Everything I've read on the topic indicates that the speakers should form an equilateral triangle with your head slightly inside the apex, and the speakers pointed inward at a 30 degree angle. The 30 degree angle was determined to be the optimum for stereo listening long ago, or so I've read.

This PDF is super useful as a guide: carltatzdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Updated-NULL-POSITIONING-ENSEMBLE™.pdf

You can disregard the length of each side of the triangle as shown (that and their position relative to your walls will be dependent upon your room modes) but the important things are the 30 degree angle and equilateral triangle with your head just inside the apex. This guy's system combined with his axial mode calculator (available here: carltatzdesign.com/acoustic-tools/) has worked wonders for me in every room I've set up in. And I'm just an idiot with an expensive hobby, but this really helps take the guesswork out of where to place my speakers and listening position.

An engineer friend told me there's a reputable consultant in LA whose main gig us purely speaker placement consulting.

Ha, not sure. Ariel from Dreamland (NY) mentioned him by name but I didn’t commit it to memory.

what everyone said. I’ll just add don’t be afraid to go your own way.
For me, I’m a sensitive maniac who hates everything I hear when I’m in the Apex of the triangle. I mean I love it for about 30 seconds, then hate it. I start annihilating everything like a chainsaw in the jungle until every bit of the original sound has been flattened and tamed. Next day I’m like wtf did I do?!

Over time I discovered I do much better listening off axis. I’ll peep my head into the on axis position if I need to for 20 seconds. The rest of the time it’s all off axis. Sometimes I’ll lean them off the floor like a stage monitor. Whatever I need to do to get a different perspective. Of course, I put them back in default position when done.

Yes…mine are straight …they sound great in that position….but I built my room from the ground up and spent a lot of time positioning the speakers etc


cheers
Wiz

Nah these days they like a wireless head worn and roaming, personally I think it’s just to make sure the sound guy is awake.