BillFitzmaurice.info

please excuse me if i seem brain dead, but speakers are round and i'd assume that they reproduce sound fairly evenly around that circle. while we all used to stack cabinets both horizontally and vertically in the old days, we are now told that only vertically is good as placing cabinets next to each other (horizontally) leads to comb filtering and other interference based problems. But how does a speaker know that left to right is any different than up and down? in a 3D world, up and down and right and left seem identical to me. why would it be OK for a bunch of 12 inch speakers to be stacked vertically, but not horizontally? how does the stack know what orientation the listener is observing the stack from?

The only reason that i can even imagine is the left-right orientation of our ears in our head - is the answer that simple? (sorry if this has been answered many times previously, but it was not an easy search)

The speaker doesn't know anything. Its our ears that tell the difference. It is quite easy for us to walk left and right. not quite easy for us to walk vertically. If one could easily travel vertically, you would hear comb filter just as easily in a vertical stack as you can hear it when walking left and right in a horizontal stack.

Read this and the subsequent chapters:
http://www.gtaust.com/filter/05/07.shtml

I strongly recommend that series of articles; besides being highly informative, it is just plain interesting, very well written (not too technical, but not "dumbed down" either). Just be warned, if you decide to take a short break from work and read these articles, you may be surprised to find that the whole morning just disappeared while you were enjoying the series.

+1