Hi Luke,

The great thing about Beolab 90 is that they can be placed wherever you want in the room without having to worry about distance to walls, room corners, etc.  Their rear-facing speaker drivers are intended to counteract the effects of room boundaries to ensure that you get great sound, regardless of placement.

If your Beolab 5s are currently near the wall then you should get a huge improvement by upgrading to Beolab 90, as the older Beolab 5s are not at their best in a confined space.

If you need any help with cabling for the Beolab 90s, please click on my sponsor link below and I will be happy to help.

Kind regards, Steve.

I read about it here: https://www.bang-olufsen.com/ContentV3/downloads/BeoLab90/bang-olufsen-beolab90-whitepaper.pdf

The BL's should be able to compensate and deal with any positioning. But, I would still keep them with some distance to back wall for the bass to be in full effect. 

:)

D

Thanks.  So it seems they ideally need 1m clearance for optimal performance.

Mine are around 30cm from the rear wall and only 20-25cm from the side walls. 

They don’t sound too bad... 😕

Luke wrote:

Perhaps I have missed it in the user manual but I can't seem to find any information on speaker placement for the Beolab 90's?  I was seconds away from purchasing a pair when I thought to double check the space I was going to put them in and found that I would only have 10cm of clearance from the back stone wall and no more than 5cm from the side wall.  I can't move them further from the side wall due to the fact the Avant 85" is in the way.  The length of the space is 4m across and the side walls come out by about .8m on one side and 1.1m on the other.  The room then opens up to 10m x 9m space.

Is this not enough room for the speakers to work effectively?  I know they won't look all that fantastic bunched up next to the Avant but i'd love to upgrade from my 5's!

Hi Luke,

the only problem I see with your placement description is the resulting difficulty in accessing the cable connections.

You do not need to worry at all about proximity to boundaries with respect to the audio performance, assuming that you do the Active Room Compensation measurements with the microphone as part of your installation process.

If your Avant is on the wall behind the loudspeakers, then this is also not an issue. If it's on a floor stand and the TV is to the side / nearly in front of the loudspeakers, then there will be some degradation of the BeoLab 90's Beam Width Control (especially the Narrow option) due to reflections off the Avant. I doubt that this will be an audible effect - but it is an effect...

If you have more questions, please feel free to ask!

Cheers

-geoff

Thank you everyone for your feedback, my partner was hoping for people to say it can't be done!  

The only concern I have now is my bed is on the floor below where the 90's will be and add the Avant 85" and the 1 tonne stone wall I'll have quite a lot of weight sitting above my head when I sleep!