Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Speaker stand for M80?

I'm looking for a 15-20" tall speaker stand for an M80. Has anyone found one that can hold it?

Thanks!

- Nuke

I take it you don't have a stage below your screen that the 80's are sitting on like mine? Normally you want the tweeters at ear level when seated, seems like they would be to high if sitting on 15-20' stands. jm2cents

What is the location of your left/right m80s? For the best experience, you want the tweeters of all 3 to be at the same level. This may not be possible for you though.

Bring on the pictures.

Nuke, it still isn't entirely clear(at least to me)why you'd require that the center speaker be raised. There doesn't appear to be a good reason not to have the M80 sitting at the same level as the mains with the mids and tweeters presumably being high enough so as to be behind the screen.

How far away from the wall will this M80 be? The ports need room to breathe.

Dude-
Just put each on a matching sub!

No, you can't put an m80 on top of the 600, there is a slant to the cabinet on the 600.

I have my m80's about 6-8" from the back wall to allow the low frequencies to filter into the room from the port.

Also, not sure about your understanding of having the center come from the center of the screen, first time I've ever heard that one. Your eyes should be at the bottom or 1/6th up from the bottom of the screen for the best viewing comfort when seated. Your tweeters for L/C/R should be at ear height when seated. This is for music AND movies it makes no difference. Now some people mount their centers above or below the screen BUT angle them up/down towards the listeners ears. This is because they have no other options.

Following up on JohnK's question and your response, if you raise the M80 centre, won't the tweeters be too high up? I suppose you could always pitch the M80 forward a bit to point the tweeters down.

With regard to standing them up on the 600, the 600 has an assymetrical cabinet. So you have to somehow prop it up to give the M80 a level surface. The other thing that you may want to check with Axiom on if you plan on doing this is magnetic coupling between the 600 and the M80. This may result in stray currents in the voicecoils or even the M80's cross-over.

My advice is to make provisions for elevated mounting but experiment to find the optimum installation.

Regarding distance from the wall, I know they have a couple mounted at the Axiom factory but that's really for background listening for the employees. The general recommendation for rear-ported speakers is a minimum of 2 feet away from the back wall. Now having said that, if you plan on crossing over to the 600 at 80Hz, I don't think that distance is a factor since the ports are really only working at low frequencies.

I used twin M22's because I couldn't fit a third M80 under the screen. That might work for you as well. You could wall mount them behind the screen, but they would still be at ear level with the R/L. You would have a wider dispersion from the center channel with two speakers as well.

I was in the process of building stands for my M80s, but due to time constraints, I had to abandon the project for a while. In the mean time, I confiscated two of my wife's end tables (~21" high) and have the M80s sitting on those. Luckily, I remembered to take the spikes off first before placing them on the tables. Now the tweeters on the M80s are roughly the same height as my center channel and to be honest, I can't tell a difference between them sitting on the floor vs. on the tables.

I knew I've seen it before....

Granted, they're not Axiom DSP Subs.

I suppose getting an ep500 might work to put the 80 on, not sure...

Quote:

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The general recommendation for rear-ported speakers is a minimum of 2 feet away from the back wall.

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With the 80's I've found that the minimum distance from rear walls should be around 7 to 8 inches, anything closer and the sound starts to change, something you will want to experiment with.

Nuke,

It sounds like you are doing exactly what I plan on doing in a few years, having three m80's behind an acoustically transparent screen. Of course you want to make sure that the entire speaker is behind the screen so that any colorations from the screen would be equal to all 3 speakers and drivers of each speaker. I imagined that I would have to put them on a speaker stand up-side-down to get the tweeters closer to ear level. But you said that the bottom of the screen is only 15" off of the ground so I guess that you don't need to do this.

Anyway, I am currently using Dayton SSHM-18 18" High Mass Metal Speaker Stands for my M22's (There is also a 12" and 24" stand in this model). These can be found at partsexpress.com and are only about $100. You can mass load these stands for extra stability, but they are very stable for my setup without doing that since they are already quite heavy. You probably would want to mass load them with the m80's though. Let us know how it turns out, I am anxious to hear since I am planning on a similar setup in the future.

- Nick

Nuke -

I've attached a drawing of what I understand you're after. On one hand you're trying to fit as many of the M80 drivers as possible behind the screen, but on the other hand unless you place the screen near the floor, you'll need to elevate it with a stand or sub.

There are several goals to go for (many mentioned here) that you're balancing:

1) Screen height. There's no hard and fast rule, some strive for the bottom edge to 1/6 the image to be at eye level, but this depends on several things. Do you like to sit in the third row and look up? Are your seats reclining? Do you have rows of heads to need to overcome? Answers to this will get you the "higher" or "lower" vote regarding image. I have tall tower speakers, and generally lean towards a lower image - my eyeline is about 1/4 up.

2) Sound image height. Having three M80s grants you the incredible advantage of having a consistent sound height (not to mention tonality, wave size, polar and transient response, but I guess I mentioned it) across your fronts. Elevate the center too much and you'll be trading off one advantage of having an identical center channel. It'll still be way better than the typical off-screen nonidentical center channel, and way way way better than dual top/bottom MTM centers - typically a sloppy mess and worse than going without a center at all.

3) Not blocking drivers with the screen border. Try to get the non-AT screen border as out of the drivers way as possible. You'll be ok if you get it down in-between the woofers. Early reflections down that low are less audible. I have a customer's install on the press page where the side L/R had to have the frame in between the woofer and midrange.

Here's what I think you have:
Nuke's M80 trio of the Gods.

Based on the feel of things, I would encourage you to think lower on the screen. You may not be able to hook it to the ceiling without chain or turnbuckles. You can cover with something (I've seen cut-off black socks work well, but I'm not going to officially recommend that or else my redneck score will go up).

Also, you may be able to elevate the L/R up a few inches. Building a nice heavy platform(s) for them can also improve the sound by decoupling them from the floor. A few speakers actually rely on floor-coupling, but it's a cheap audiophile trick that often tightens up the bass.

Then after those two, you may find your center channel stand height requirement shorter. Or sitting it on a sub would be pretty badass.

Let me know if you want the drawing tweaked to show changes. I actually do recommend heavy tow-in for the L/R if they're outside the screen. Try it - it's free and I find it typically widens the sweet spot and improves the imaging for the off-center seats.

Definitely keep the speakers at least many inches from any nearby wall. Just space them out as much as reasonable. Being closer than 3 feet to reflective surfaces will blur the transient response. The closer you place them to the wall, the more aggressive you should treat the reflection points with 4" (no less) foam. foambymail is a good source.

Cheers,
Chris