I do not have any of your gear, but have done the same sort exercise many times in my room. If my advice is elementary, please forgive me. I have only been in the hobby for four years and feel my hearing is well trained.
I've been through this process with Kef 105/3's, Chapman T-7's, Merlin VSM-SE's, Spendor SP100's, and my current speaker, the Talon Khorus. It usually ends up taking me six months to a year to find a final spot for a new speaker.
1. There is a good mod for the analog RS meter that eliminates the error correction and increases sensitivity and frequency response. It costs about $12 in parts and works great. I wll try to find the link if you are interested.
2. A good starting speaker position can be achieved by using the Cardas Golden Ratio Method: (http://www.cardas.com/insights/roomsetup.html)
If your room is rectangular, not L-shaped or square, his method will help you avoid camping on a resonant node.
3. To adjust the distance between the speakers, use tracks 1 and 2 (voice in and out of phase) on the XLO Test and Burn-In CD. This can fix problems where your side walls are dissimilar, like having wood on one side and sheetrock on the other.
4. This is what I finally ended up doing instead of guessing:: Walk the speakers toward the back wall one inch at a time. At each step play a song that has a walking bass line going down or up. This allows you to see if you hear all of the notes, or if there are dropouts. You can use the meter at each step, but your ears are a valuable measuring instrument too. Take notes at each step and take a few days at it. For example, in my room I found a pattern of bass nulls that repeated every 11 inches. There will be a spot better than the others, and the spot differs with different speakers. Putting the speakers on spikes will change the spot because you are raising the woofer.
5. Some speakers just won't behave in your room no matter where you put them. I've spent serious money on acoustic panels, bass traps, and skyline diffusers just to fix some of the problems. I still ended up with bass spikes and suckouts that affected the midrange and treble. This led me to step 5.
6. I bought a Tact RCS 2.0 room correction system two weeks ago. The unit fits your sytem's frequency response to one of 50 or so target curves, so the room mostly becomes a non-problem. In fact, you can pretty much put the speakers wherever you want and let the Tact handle it. This does not mean that the basic room acoustics can be ignored. I stil put damping at the first refkectin point and on the front wall, but frequency response problems are gone. You can also create your own curves if you want. I've spent more money on damping and absorbtion products than on the Tact.
7. As you can tell, I'm impressed. I suspect you might be able to buy reasonably-priced speakers and let the Tact deal with recessed mids, or tilted up treble, or thin bass. No, I am not selling anything, just feeling freed from moving some very heavy speakers aroung the room.
Bob
