I noticed something interesting the other day when my brother was over. I had put some music on and we were standing behind the couch talking when I noticed that the sound stage was much better than in the sweet spot.

I did a quick test ducking down so head level was where it would be while seated and standing back up several times. In the standing position the music had much more of that 3 dimensional quality I was so impressed by at Axiom. The music was being played in one of the surround formats.

Interestingly, when standing, my head is about 1-1.5' below the level of the surround speakers; within the recommended placement.

Not having done any level matching yet, it could be that I need to bump up the level on my surrounds. I was wondering though, if there are generaly known effects of placing speakers higher than the 1-2 feet above ear level?

On a related note, I was listening to the radio the other day and noticed that the voice was strongly centered to the right of the TV. I had kind of noticed this with movies and some music, but it was not nearly as pronounced. I bumped up my left front by 2db and it is now nicely centered.

I expect this is the effect of having the love seat along the left side partially blocking the speaker and blocking first reflections. I will experiment to see if I can verify this.

Your suspicions may well prove correct. I have always had my rears pretty high up relative to my seated couch position, so I can't say whether the height difference improves the field or not. Considering the diffuse sound field created by the QS's, though, I bet bumping the levels up would improve the "immersion" if nothing more than because you would be aware of them more.

I guess what I am really curious about is what the difference would be between upping the volume vs moving the whole sound field (ie: the speaker) down.

An important thing with the QS8 is that, because they fire from the bottom, lowering them closer to you often results in you having to pump up the volume! So you might want to consider taking your SPL meter in hand and re-do the calibration to make sure everything is OK (also speaker distance).

Only one way to satisfy your curiosity and that is to try it out. Take the Q's down and place them on a ladder or a table or something. Try a couple of large soup cans under the speaker to elevate it off the surface so the bottom speaker still fires into the air.

Tell us what you think.

Hmm... They really fire from all sides, so lowering them would give less from the bottom, but more from the sides/top.

I have not done any calibration yet. Flipping back through the receiver manual I see that there is a built in test tone so I really should go back and do this. For some reason I had it in mind that I didn't have access to test tones.