Advice on wall mounting Linn Katan speakers

or any other small speaker...

Gavin:

I can only offer common sense advice from using/placing small Braun wall mounted speakers in the late 70's.

I had pretty much a clean rectangular room to work with, which meant that locating the speakers for best sound was a mind boggling task.

I pulled a couple of 2" x 12" x 8' planks out of storage (cheap 2 x 4's would have worked) and used these to play around with placement (including height).

This did not give me a completely accurate representation of how the speakers would sound when finally affixed to the wall, but it was close enough. Bass and clarity increased with wall mounting VS the planks wedged against the wall with crates of LP's to secure them.

The Braun brackets pinched the speakers @ their tops/bottoms (not certain how the Linn brackets function). Adjusting the tension of the brackets (beyond just securing them @ a certain angle) would alter the tone of the speakers, which made this another adjustment to the balance channels and and the overall sound.

Having others hold the speakers in various positions (tried this first) did not work as the speakers sounded poorly in all positions. The brackets/speakers need to be fixed to something of mass (like a wood plank).

Thanks for the advice Dekay. I tried lifting the speakers, and having someone do that while I listened as well, and I couldn't hear much difference in relation to being lifted off of a solid base. I am not sure if that has to do with the mass of the speakers I am using...the Katans are 6 kg, and they are really small.

I will outline my experience here in case someone is going up against the same thing:

I too have a rectangle room, where I pretty much have to have the speakers on one of the short walls. So, that kind of limited me to positioning, as I was trying to keep out of essentially 2 corners. It ends up that the most likely listening position is further away than then distance between the speakers (2.4 meters for the speakers, 3.5 for the listening position). The nice thing with the Linn brackets is that they are adjustable both verticaly and horizontaly. They also seem to be a very solid design, nice and heavy, screwing into the back of the speaker. I would suggest them to anyone thinking of mounting a set of speakers that are up to about 8 kg or so.

About the wall they were going on, it is drywall, 1/2 inch, with about 8 cm or so before there is a sealed insulation cavity. Beyond that, there is a solid wood wall ( 2*4s stacked vertically: 1930s construction in Norway). One one speaker, half of the bracket caught a stud, and the other half, along with all four mounting points of the second speaker, I used a wood anchor (plywood, a little larger than the bracket, slipped behind the drywall via the temporary hole we made for running the speaker cable). I didn't use normal drywall anchors because I was nervous about them ripping out of the wall, and I wanted to add at least a little bit of mass behind the bracket.

Result: Very good! I was worried about the wall, thinking it would do strange things with the sound, but it really seems like it is not much of a factor except I did notice the bass being a touch muddy...I backed off the bass on my Classik, and that seemed to make a very subtle, good difference. I will experiment with this, as well as the angle of the speakers, to try and improve on things.

Gavin:

Sounds good to me. Adding a brace behind the drywall was a good idea. The old place was lath covered with a very thick coat of slap plaster (late 1920's spanish structure).

Generally the firmer/sturdier the mount the tighter the bass response.

Our current place has drywall. May try your brace idea when I wall mount speakers in the bedroom (would probably run a 2 x 12 between the vertical studs).