Speakers too wide apart?

you might be able to use some kind of house plant for you first reflection. if that is permissable

The music has more weight and solidity to it

What you have done by placing the speakers further from side walls is to cut down on early reflections form the mid and treble - it allows your brain to process the primary signal before the reflections arrive - you hear more detail rather than a cluttered claustrophobic sound.

If you get the speakers away from the back wall (6 feet or so) and add bass traps you can extend the "solidity" into the lower midrange and bass (although you will lose some room bass boost). Bass frequencies below about 600 Hz go in all directions - so a speaker at two feet from the back wall will have reflected bass and lower mids being reflected back at the listener from the wall behind the speakers. It won't affect the soundstage as much as sidewall reflections of mid and treble sounds but you still lose a bit of solidity.

Tboooe, there is one school of speaker placement, though obscure in high end, that places the speakers almost right next to each other and then places a sound absorbing material directly between the two speakers and extends that barrier almost all the way to the listening position.

I read about it in David Moulton's book, "Total Recording." I've never tried it out personally...

Shadorne, reading your posts about speaker placement, and then looking at the speaker placement in your personal system where they are built directly into a wall unit, makes me wonder if you follow your own placement rules?

What you have done by placing the speakers further from side walls is to cut down on early reflections form the mid and treble - it allows your brain to process the primary signal before the reflections arrive - you hear more detail rather than a cluttered claustrophobic sound

He is also decreasing bass loading as well. If they were too close to the walls before, he was likely overloading the bass and getting heavy resonance in certain frequencies. This would muddy up the imaging, making it harder to hear some of the other frequencies and consequently affect the precision of localization. A person can correct for the reflection issues that close wall placement causes fairly easily with good absorption material, but you can't easily deal with the bass loading problem...

Also, he might have been suffering from imaging of instruments and vocals that are out of proportion if the speakers were too far apart.