Jimbo,

> here's a brief outline and PIC of my room <

I'd slide everything over to the right a bit to be more symmetrical left/right if possible.

> Speaker placement? <

In a room that small you don't have a lot of choices.

The drawing below shows the ideal placement, and THIS article on my company's site explains the goals in more detail.

> Sub placement? <

When I bought my first subwoofer, a Carver Sunfire, a few years ago I tried a variety of places. Then I looked in the manual and it said to put it in one of the front corners. Bingo, that was clearly the best place. More recently I got an SVS PB12-Ultra/2 subwoofer and noticed that its manual also said a front corner is best. By then I didn't even need to experiment. I put it there and it's even more fabulous than the Sunfire.

That said, a front corner is clearly the loudest location, but it won't be the flattest unless you have a fair number of bass traps. Loud works for me <smile>, but I also have 40 traps in my living room home theater and they reduce the problems (peaks, ringing) you get with corner placement.

The only way to know for sure which place is best is to measure the response. But you need to measure to a high resolution such as 1 Hz intervals. This can be time consuming because moving the sub even an inch or two can make a real difference. So you end up measuring, moving, measuring, moving, and so forth for the better part of an evening.

One useful method is to put the subwoofer at the listening position on a chair, then play some bass-heavy music and crawl around on the floor listening for where the bass is the most even. Once you find the best place by ear, put the subwoofer there. One problem with this is the key of the music affects what you hear. If the music has tones that align with the room's modes, then this method can work pretty well. But if the music is in a key that doesn't excite the room modes, then other music that DOES excite the modes may sound unbalanced. One solution is to use pink noise instead of music. THIS short article on my company's web site explains this in more detail, and there's a low frequency filtered pink noise MP3 file you can download.

But again, the only way to know for sure where the low frequency response is flattest is to measure.

I hope this helps.

--Ethan