Actually, old boy, given the dismissive tone of your post, I won't do the courtesy of hunting down the article where I first read about this 5 year's ago when I first used Audyssey in my Onkyo. However, for the benefit of understanding, what Audyssey calls speaker distance is actually from the time delay it calculates for each channel. This delay is caused by the time it takes for a sound signal to be processed in the electronics plus the fact that a sound signal has to pass through solid objects to get to listening position and not just through the air like a laser light. And if your personal experience is different then fine, but I prefer to leave my distances as per Audyssey. Don't know if true for newer Audyssey, but mine uses the FIRST listening position to measure "distance".