Placement of microphones and design of filters in a microphone network are solved simultaneously. Using filterbanks with multiple sub-channels for each microphone, the design of the filter response is solved simultaneously with placement. By using an objective function that penalizes the number of sub-channels in any solution, only some of many possible sub-channels and corresponding microphones and filters are selected while also solving for the filter responses for the selected sub-channels. For a given target location, the location of the microphones and the filter responses to beamform are optimized.