How to Place a Bluetooth Speaker to Get the Best Possible Sound

Last Updated on January 12, 2023 by Norvan Martin

Bluetooth speakers are pretty magical things to have around your house. At the touch of a button, you could be listening to your favorite tunes or a hopefully not boring podcast with great bass and clarity.

However, Bluetooth speakers can sound very different depending on where they are placed. Yes, sometimes it is indeed a problem with the product itself – some Bluetooth speakers aren’t great – but if you are lacking bass as well as getting atonal or tinny sound, you might want to think about moving things around.

So, where can you place your Bluetooth speakers to get the best sound? Well, that question isn’t as easy to answer as you might think. Every single room and every speaker is different, but we can give you some advice to consider.

Picking Your Positioning

Picking the correct position for your speakers can make them sound significantly better. Obviously, if you have your speakers facing a wall, the volume and sound clarity will be significantly dampened as the sound waves both bounce off and are absorbed into the wall.

Naturally, the first step is to position your speakers towards you or the area you want the sound to radiate.

However, the speakers mustn’t be too low or too high above where you want to listen. If you are positioning your speakers to radiate at the couch, you will want them to be roughly the same height as your ears while sitting there.

Another tip is to keep your speakers at least a few inches from the wall, as it will improve the bass response. The bass might seem better if you get them back closer to the wall, but you might also notice that the mid-range sounds start to lose clarity.

A placement that many audiophiles prefer is to place the speaker in a corner or a nook so that the hard surfaces better reflect quality sound and bass response. However, you don’t want to fully enclose it for obvious reasons.

Tiled rooms are also great at reflecting sound since they bounce right off and create great acoustics.

This makes your kitchen a good choice if you have a tile backsplash on your counters. However, the most common titled room is your bathroom, and you probably won’t have too many kickin’ parties in there.

Finally, if you are using more than one speaker and want great surround sound, you should go for a triangle placement around your usual listening area. This means that the sound should be coming at you from all sides, and you will get an amazing listening experience.

 

Buying a Speaker of the Right Shape

Bluetooth speaker shape is occasionally pretty standard, but sometimes you will find cylinders or more overly odd shapes among the pack.

These shapes are not just about visual aesthetics but also affect sound acoustics.

The shape of your Bluetooth speaker will also affect where you should place it. Your standard cube or brick model does best when facing its audience.

However, the cylinder shape thrives best when placed in the middle of the room since it radiates sound from all sides.

Even if you have an odd-shaped speaker like, for example, the BeoPlay S3 that looks more like a stately dodecahedron than your typical rectangular parallelepiped-shaped speaker, even then, it usually will only radiate sound from all sides, or in this case, one-face side. So the positioning tips for normal-shaped speakers still apply based on that knowledge.

 

Experimenting

While we can give you positioning tips, every single room is different. Some surfaces reflect sound better than others, and some people like to listen to their speakers in different places. The only concrete tip we can give you is to experiment.

If you feel like your speaker isn’t giving you the best sound experience, try setting it in a different area, height, or direction. If, in the end, you aren’t getting the results you want, it may, in fact, be the speaker’s issue, possibly even the Bluetooth connection.

How High Should My Speakers Be?

The most ideal height for the best sound delivery from your speakers is the height of your ear; that is, when you are in your normal listening position. For most people, this will be when they are sitting in their favorite armchairs.

Bonus Tip: AptX

AptX is essentially Bluetooth but with an audio focus. This is why the sound can be better or worse on the same speaker, depending on the phone you use.

In an ideal listening experience, you want the speaker and the phone to be able to use Bluetooth AptX since it allows for higher-quality music and sound streaming. While this is pretty standard in speakers and many phones, this isn’t something you will get with iPhones.

They seem to wage a dirty little war with Bluetooth, and it hurts us all in terms of sound quality since they don’t use AptX.

However, if your device does not support AptX, you can also get the same better-quality sound by connecting your device via the 3.5mm port. However, in these days of wireless and mobility, fewer and fewer Bluetooth-enabled speakers are coming with that option.

FAQs

1. How does speaker placement affect the sound?

Small changes in the speaker’s positioning may significantly impact the speaker’s acoustic balance. That way, you can even get good audio and music experience.  As mentioned in this article, certain ways can have an impact, like, positioning your speakers towards the rear wall will provide more bass, while placing them further away will reduce the amount of low end you hear but should provide a more realistic stereo image.

2. Do speakers sound better if kept closer to a wall or in a corner?

Most speakers produce a boomy, shut-in sound when placed close to walls; place them at the corners, which becomes much more noticeable. This is beneficial if small speakers don’t create much bass but can provide an uncomfortably heavy sound when combined with larger speakers and bass-laden tracks.

3. Can hackers hack through Bluetooth?

Some hackers can use Bluetooth to hack your device. Even more troubling is that hackers can do this without interacting with the user. This sort of Bluetooth cyberattack involves delivering spam messages via Bluetooth.

It is important to avoid spam messages and click on phishing links or links that are from unrecognizable places. 

4. What’s the difference between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth?

Bluetooth enables the transport of data between devices across short distances. As an example, it is extensively used in mobile phone headsets to enable hands-free phone use. Wi-Fi, on the other hand, connects gadgets to the Internet.