Hi JLunden,
Here's the technical rationale for the QS8's design. Our ear/brain hearing mechanism depends on delayed lateral and vertical reflected sounds (plus the sounds that travel directly to our ears from a source) to "tell" it how big a space we are in.
Cinemas and movie auditoriums and concert halls, etc. are much, much larger than normal domestic living rooms and home theater rooms. In all of this, remember that sound travels at about 1 foot per millisecond, so in your living room, the relected sounds from the side walls and ceiling are only delayed by a few milliseconds because the room is relatively small.
In big cinemas, auditoriums and even outside, your ears are constantly receiving spatial clues provided by reflected sounds that have traveled hundreds of feet in many cases, and hence are delayed by 50 to 100 milliseconds or more. These reverberant delays tell your brain you are in a much bigger space.
In a big cinema the surrounds speakers on the side wall and rear wall are some distance from you, and distances to the ceiling and other surfaces are much greater than in your living room, so natural delays are part of the experience. Additionally, Dolby inserts digital delays into the surround signals to further "trick" your ears into believiing you are in a bigger space.
Axiom's quadpolar approach mimics what takes place in large cinemas by having drivers fire in different directions, so that when the reflected sounds reach your ears (plus the digital delay inserted by your AV receiver DSP decoder), it simulates a much larger "space" and delivers a plausible illusion that your home theater room is, in fact, an outdoor scene or a big room, or whatever the mixing engineers intend.
As I write this, I'm thinking of a scene in the The Bourne Identity, where Matt Damon is in a marsh and someone fires a shotgun (the villain?) and a flock of ducks takes off. The QS8s and the sound mix deliver an uncanny sense of space that's extremely believable in my modest living room. There are lots of other examples in different movies.
Similarly, I've often found that with some well-engineered DVD-A or SACD recordings that use the surround channels for "hall ambience" really open up into convincing replications of concert space when played back using QS8 or QS4s in the surround channels. Many CDs played through DPLII(x) or Harman's Logic7 also greatly benefit from this effect.
Regards,
