Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions QS8's mounting system...

Well I finally received my QS8's about a week ago. Sadly, I haven’t had the time to install them until last night. I had to finish setting up the HT room first. We re-did all the speaker cables, wall mounted the 50” Panny, re-painted the room, got a new TV stand for the audio components and then finally got the QS8's up on the wall!! All I need to do now is hook everything up to the receiver and fire it up!

But I need to complain a little about the QS8's mounting system. To me, Axiom needs to work on this small but important feature. The one thing I noticed when I opened the box last night was the T brackets. Honestly, these things look cheap & very thin. You can actually bend it with two fingers! I'm sure it holds well and does the job, but I need to punch 6 holes in the wall to make sure it does versus 2 on my older Energy C-R1's or the Monitor Audio surrounds I was going for originally.

Before installing the brackets I was looking at the back of the speaker and was wondering about the bottom part of the bracket and where the binding post where located… To me, things seemed a little tight back there, and I wasn't wrong! After the T bracket was screwed into the wall and the speaker was attached to it there really wasn’t much place for anything else. The bottom part of the T bracket block’s a decent amount of the access to the back part of the binding post. And In my case, once the 8’s are on the wall there’s no way I can use banana plugs. I can either spend $90 on the other brackets Axiom sells on the site or punch a hole in the wall to get extra space. So I needed to go bare wire.

Don’t get me wrong, the QS8 itself is a great speaker. It's very well built, feels massive and it looks damn nice. But I really dislike the bracket and mounting system.

The Energy C-R1's I owned before had a center piece that was screwd into the back with 4 mounting post's on each side. The center piece was recessed by an inch (more or less) on the inside and had the binding post facing upward. This made things easy to install and a piece of cake to connect. This is just my .02 regading the QS8’s mounting system. This doesnt make it a deal breaker but I would have expected something else.

Heres a pic of the C-R1's back... this is nt mine, just a pic I found online

ohlavrac,

I have a pair of QS8s installed. I only used four of the six holes to mount mine. The two in highest and lowest holes the middle (one on top of the other) are in a stud. The other two holes (furthest left and right) are screwed into drywall using [ur=http://www.easyanchors.com/]plastic easy anchors[/url]. While the bracket itself isn't extremely stiff, the tabs that connect to the back of the QS8s are certainly up to the task.

As for the snugness back there, that's only really an issue if you're trying to use banana plugs. If that's what you're doing, consider going with bare wire, which won't make any difference in how your speakers sound.

I just finally used the T brackets to install a pair of QS8s as front height speakers been using stands up to now. I was quite impressed at how well the little unassuming bracket secured the speaker so tightly to the wall. I found that 4 screws with drywall anchors were enough to hold it in place. Since I use only bare wire (to lazy to terminate with anything else) it’s a non-issue.

I actually like it too. But I knew going into it that it was designed for bare wire and not bananna plugs.

You may be able to bend it out in one direction, but the strength it offers (and needs) is in the vertical direction, and I've never felt for a moment it isn't up to the task.

...where as, I would be much less likely to believe two keyhole screw mounts would be up to the task.

Banana plugs are not that great of a terminating system anyway, at least to me. I would rather go bare(best connection) or spade connectors both of which work with the QS8s. I only use banana plugs for my mains which I unplug and move around quite often.

I guess I could have used 4 instead of 6 but the way the bracket felt to me, I didnt want to take a chance so I bolted it down :). A little more space back there would be nice... if you look at the C-R1's (can't really see it with that pic) the 4 mouting holes stick out a little more then the rest and that actually gives you a little under a 1/2 inch of extra room to set everything up.

Like I said, this isnt a deal breaker because I still love the looks of this beast, but at $650 a pair something better would be nice. Ill post pics of it on the wall tonight.

I know the banana plugs won't change anything in sound, but we are paying to have a nice sounding and looking speaker... so a little something to help in esthetics isnt all bad. And its got its usefull points.

ill still be ordering another pair in a few months btw... I cancelled the 2nd pair I had for the TV stand.

A speaker sitting closer to the wall is more aesthetic to me than one sitting farther out.

I think it was... the mounts are part of the speakers and not screwed on.

it was very tight to the wall... as you can see in this pic of my old setup.

Keep in mind that the further out from the wall the speaker's center of mass is located, the more lateral force (i.e. pulling away from the wall) will be exerted on the upper mounting points.

With the QS8, practically the entire weight of the speaker is transferred to the bracket via the two tabs that hug the wall closely. That means your bracket mounting points are experiencing only a shearing force (i.e. parallel to the wall).

One might even let their daughter swing from the cord, the QS8s attach so well to the wall.

What Peter said.

Also if you compare the way the Energy is wall mounted to the T bracket mounted QS8 you'll see that the weight is more evenly distributed with the QS8 over a much wider area. With the four mounting points of the Energy all the weight of the speaker will be in that centered area as opposed to the wider area of the QS8.

Whenever I wall mounted our QS8s using the supplied T brackets I actually ordered some recessed speaker binding plates from Parts Express so that there would be sufficient room for banana plugs but ended up connecting the bare wire to the binding post on the speakers, I also used the appropriate sized EZ Anchors for the T brackets and believe a person could actually hang from the speakers ... but I ain't going to try it.

As everyone else has done when using the T-bracket, I hard wired my QS8's, but out of curiousity has anyone tried the angular type banana plugs(such as Dayton) available from some of the parts suppliers?

Here's what I was *going* to do.

Using a plate very similar to this (almost identical)...



I was going to remove the binding post from the plates, mount the plate on the wall after running the speaker wires through the binding post holes, place banana plugs on the wires and then connect to the QS8s. This should make for a clean and tidy installation but in the past five years not one person has ever removed any of the QS8s to see how they are mounted so that's why I just ran the bare wire through the wall to the speaker.

Thats not a bad idea actually.

BTW rich, you've got a killer setup!

Hey, the link is fixed! Damn, that IS nice!

Guys sure like to talk about how they've mounted things or how they would have mounted things.

I talked about how my daughter hung from mine and it made me angry.

...very, very angry indeed!!...



::: in a Marvin the Martian voice :::

My biggest problem with the brackets was I would mount them perfectly level (checked with a level), and then I would put the speaker on and it was off .

I guess the little hooks on the back were not exactly even, so I had to tilt the brackets a touch.

oh man... I had the same issue. I think this was another thing that got to me that night I chaged levels, screwed and unscrewed the damn things a few times and still couldn't understand what was going on. I figured "its 2am, been up since 5am... leave it alone"

Heh. I never checked if the speakers were level. I figured if the QS8 brackets were level, that was good enough for me.

Whenever I did the install I just leveled the T brackets for our QS8s and all four speakers are dead on according to my trusty torpedo level.

Y'all probably just have some walls that are not level.

Speaking of speakers and leveling, have y'all ever noticed how the floor standers (80s in my case) always have a tendency to lean out at the top whenever placed on carpet using the rubber feet? I have a handful of quarters I keep on hand and use as shims on the outboard feet to level the speakers.

Could be the weight of all those (speaker) magnets.

Has to be Adrian, no way it could have ever been the contractor who leveled the floor whenever the room was constructed ... I know him personally, he does excellent work.

Now, if we can just explain why your armchair keeps sliding away from the wall....

It's the magnets.

My bed keeps sliding over to one side of the bedroom (hardwood floor). When I get up in the morning, it seems to have shifted almost a foot. I can't explain it.

Cheers,
Alan

As long as it doesn't shift on the wrong foot.

And as long as he doesn't go blind.
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Sorry, couldn't resist.

Sometimes my bed stays still but the room spins around me. Weird...

That's why I alternate hands.

Ambidexterity comes in very handy at times.

ha, ha. LOL! Hilarious replies from all. I admit my post was a bit of a setup line. . .

Alan

tie the bed down like you do a Christmas tree

or during an exorcism

wtf ? lol

Well just thought i'd put in a small update on the QS8's... man I love them! They bring out a lot of small nuances that I didnt notice before with the Energy surrounds! Very satisfied with this purchase.

Nice to hear from another satisfied owner