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What I found interesting/astounding was that when my back is to the speakers, so my chair is spun around 180, it sounds different than when I am facing the speakers.





This is due to the fact that your pinnae (your outer ears - Mickey Mouse's were big circles) have an intentional acoustic shadowing effect that will change the amount of high frequency that you can hear relative to low frequencies. This is one of the mechanisms/responses by which we are able to localize sound. This is not due to room acoustics - it's due to the acoustics of your ear shape and relationship to direct sound. You should note a decrease in perceived mid-high frequency content in the 'reverse' position. This is part of what tells your brain the sound is coming from behind you - this and the very small inter-aural time delays that occur as you rotate your head away from the source.

Look up Head-Related Transfer Function or HRTF for short, to see how your physical head and ear shape and whatnot 'EQ' sounds. It's a fascinating topic. There are binaural recording dummies (of which I have used Brüel & Kjær, Head Acoustics extensively, and to some extent GRAS and Neumann) which try to use generalized HRTFs to help record sound more in the way that we hear sound.

Regarding your room - from what I recall in previous photos, you had your monitors tucked right up against the angled ceiling of the room. This WILL cause comb filtering at your listening/monitoring location. To what extent remains a bit of a challenge - but one should avoid any hard reflecting surfaces within a few feet of your monitors - particularly the mid and high frequency driver locations for your monitors. Auralex recommends putting absorptive material (depth is dependent on wavelength) on surfaces where if you mounted a mirror, you can look from your listening location to the mirror and see the monitors in the mirror. This is simply ray-tracing acoustics at play. If the room is big enough, the comb filtering effect from walls dissipates as the reflected energy is much much lower than the direct energy from the speakers. However, the photo I recall from your room was that the monitors were nearly touching the angled ceiling. The reflected energy will be strong enough to constructively and destructively interfere (enhance and reduce) certain frequencies at your listening location.

-Scott

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