[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

And mixing and mastering requires that the listener move back and forth between the listening position and the console constantly. Often for hours at a time. It's usually only to lean forward and back, but it's tough to do it absolutely reproducibly. Do you think we're overanalyzing? How much of a difference would you expect to hear from the spots 1 ft apart?

I suggest playing pink noise through the speakers and lean around as you would regularly. Pink noise is a particularly unforgiving signal source; you will hear a change in timbre if response is changing at those positions. I suggest doing this little test with one speaker only, as timbre will change if your position in relation to the two speakers changes - i.e., moving slightly closer to one or the other.

Something else you could do, possibly in conjunction with the pink noise test (especially if it does show timbre change) would be to take a few REW readings at the various places where your head will be during mixing and mastering, to see at what frequencies response changes are taking place. Again, I suggest using a single speaker for this to avoid comb filtering from being off-centered between the speakers, since I presume that you aren't always located prefectly between the two.

Once you see in REW where potential problem areas are, you could play some music you're familiar with and see if what you're finding with the pink noise and/or REW tests transfers to listening tests. For instance, if an REW reading you took in the leaning-back position showed increased bass in the 60 Hz range, listening tests may show that it's not nearly as audible as it looked on the graph. Or, it could sound just as bad as it looked.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Wayne