Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Someone convince me

Quick background, I'm in the middle of finishing my basement and will have a theater area with 123" diy screen that I've had for the last year.
I will be wiring for 7.1 and have a bit of an odd room that it the theater will be fitting in.
Question, How many of you have switched from a decent set of surrounds or your full setup and have had the big wow factor over your previous speakers.
Wife is always a factor and spending $850 for 4 qs4s or $1080 for 4 qs8s isn't going to go over well.

Just curious on your thoughts

My home theatre space consisted of a 1000 cubic foot space with Bose 601s as the fronts, a no-name centre, a 150W Sony sub, two Sony bookshelves as my rears, and a 28" GE tube-style TV crammed into an oak entertainment centre. The audio was powered by my current Denon receiver. The best picture I have is the one below (ignore my daughter's science project pictured up front).



We then renovated the basement into the 4,000 cubic foot space you see below.







I still have the Denon amp but the TV is now replaced by a Sammy 32" LCD, and the speakers have been a replaced by an Epic80/600 7.1 system. I know for a fact that there is absolutely no way that my old speaker/sub gear could satisfy me in this larger space for music or movies. As for the TV, I am sure it would have served us fine if it was still working but it sure would have been ugly.

With the 600 in this space, I don't need a couch shaker for movies. And music with this sub is absolutely superb as the sub weaves the bass between the music rather than just laying it on top. All the subtleties of bass are revealed. The QS8s are very different from my old Sonies. They are very diffuse making surround effects difficult to localize which is actually very cool. I could have definitely lived with the Boses for movies although I would have had to crank up my receiver to the point of distortion. But the 80s are astounding with music. They have the perfect balance of lows, mids, highs, image exceptionally well and the soundstage extends well beyond the speaker boundaries with well-recorded material. And they are very efficient so you don't need a 250W/channel amp. As you can see, the speakers actually enhance the over-all appearance of the space.

So for me, this has been a huge step up.

I can see why you have the column behind your couch as I would think your system would slide your couch back as you turn the speakers up.
Thanks for the reply, your area makes me feel better about mine as that my rear speakers will probably be as high as the ones that you have hanging from your ceiling and I thought they might be too high.
With these surrounds is there any reason not to just flush mount them because I was thinking I might need to get one of their brackets to use so that it would angle it down a bit toward the listener. I assume yours sound just fine the way you have them mounted?

. Removing the column would have been an unnecessary expense as moving the couch further back would have required moving the front speakers further apart and now we'd be getting too close to the fireplace.

Mine sound great but I don't know what I may be missing by not angling them down. In audio, what you don't know can't hurt you. Having said that, I have no problem hearing the treble from the QS8s and that's the only reason I can think of for angling them down.

Here are some pics of my surrounds they are about 4" away from the ceiling and angled down more due to the rear center not being fully ceiling mounted and I felt needed to be turned in just a bit to close off that corner. In order to twist it I had to angle it down a little too, then it looked funny with the other one flat, so they received the twist/angle look as well.

They do look nice on the wall don't they.. almost like they are meant to be there...

Yeah...that's what you need to be telling your spouse .