The answer depends on your sonic preference and the acoustics of a given room. It’s no mystery that an acoustic space influences the propagation of sound waves, but you may not know that the long-wavelength bass frequencies our cabinets pump out are more interactive with a room than the rest of the audible frequency range. Most notably, bass cabinet placement affects a listener’s perception of loudness and fidelity. Proximity to a wall or corner has the most audible effect on a bass cabinet’s loudness, due to the near uniform radiation of low frequencies. The low frequencies projected rearward are reinforced by the hard surfaces, resulting in a boosting effect. You can attain as much as 9dB of boost merely by placing the cabinet in a corner.

Isolation from the floor can decrease perceived volume—a cabinet directly placed or “coupled” to a floor can excite the floor at a resonant frequency, resulting in a perceived boost at frequencies below the resonance point. But isolating a speaker also improves fidelity, as the energy your amp is partially dedicating to vibrating the floor and the cabinet is more efficiently directed toward moving the air.

Got a question? Need a suggestion? Don’t get indigestion; send your query to bassplayer@musicplayer.com with the subject line “Ask BP.” We’ll try to answer it ourselves, or we’ll foist it off on a genius of our choosing.