The girls are gonna think you bin working out what with all the speaker moving.
That's the plan. Carrying the M40s and M60s up and down the stairs every couple of days has to help a bit. If I was more motivated I guess I would rig a pulley arrangement so that the weight of the speakers I'm bringing down from the HT area offsets the weight of the speakers I'm carrying back up.
Rather than tilting the speakers back ~5 degrees (1x2 under the front feet) I tried raising them ~10 inches instead. I was surprised how much the midrange seemed to improve (presumably from being a bit less off-axis ?) and the soundstage seemed to increase in size vertically (which I don't understand at all).
On the downside I think the really deep bass I was enjoying was impacted a bit for the worse -- I can still hear the really low notes in On The Run but I don't seem to be able to hear them moving as much as I did with the speakers on. Could be placement nuance or different levels (wishing I had taken a picture of the volume control setting) but I experimented with both and didn't get the same results as before.
On the other hand the midrange improvements mean I'm now hearing phasing effects on a few songs (Heart's Mistral Wind and a Tangerine Dream song whose name I don't remember) which I previously only noticed on the M60s. Better midrange at the cost of cool deep bass, that's a choice I would rather not have to make. Ignoring the very deep bass, however, the M40s are now sounding closer to the M60s in the midrange than they ever have before, enough to make me wonder if the M40s would have been loved more if they had been a few inches taller.
As usual no expense was spared and only the finest materials were used when constructing the speaker stands. I might replace them with something solid after a bit more testing:
