Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Toe-in and mounting height of on wall speakers

Hello Forum

Just ordered three M5HPOW for the LCR behind my 100" wide screen. The main viewing area is within the screen edges but there is seating outside the edges as well. I'm wondering about two installation items;

1. Toe-in of the L and R speakers. Should you do it with on walls? What did you use for angling spacers?
2. Tweeter height? should it be ear level or above or below.

I did one with in-walls as you mention. Tweeters ended up at 34” and no toe in. Sounded A+. The M5HPs sound best when tweeters slightly lower than ear level per my and Mojo’s tests. He likes em even lower.

I would not recommend toeing in onwall speakers because their frequency response is designed with loading of the wall. IE. flat to wall. In-walls/on-walls come with compromises, but in the end can still be fantastic.

Let them run in for 1hour while you are assembling the screen. What I do. They arent their best out of the box. But they sure sound impressive once they balance out. Mids takes a sec to catch up to the woofer output in my experience.

On walls work best mounted on a wall. Movies have a 3 channel setup to place the sound near where the action is on the screen for all seats. Toe in is not as critical as a 2 channel system. So if the system is going to be used for movies only I’d wall mount.

If you what to also use it for 2 channel music then I’d consider toe in if it imaged better. You would have to experiment with it since toe in is room dependent. I’d first wall mount them and see if you are happy with the image. After that if imaging is important to you then spend the time to experiment ... you might loose some bass response which may not be a big deal since I assume you have a sub. You can also try placing some ply behind it and see if you gain it back. I’d then go back and see what effect it had on for movie play back. All in all a lot of work if your not into such things ...

Trevor, hate it when some one sneaks in a post before me ... I need to start using a real keyboard instead of this dang iPad ...

I have experience with M2OW and M5OW. There is no need to toe in either. They provide great imaging and if they are 3 feet or more away from side-walls, they will provide a wide soundstage right out to the room boundaries. With you sitting 12 feet away, at louder volumes I expect the soundstage to wrap around the sides.

Perhaps I can speak to that as well. When looking at various pictures of set-ups where OW speakers have been installed, they are usually with wall-mounted flat panel televisions where the center channel is mounted under the monitor and the two L/R speakers are on each side about half way up. In order to streamline the footprint of my set-up, a few months ago, I replaced my M80 and VP180 full-size monitors with an OW VP180 and TWO OW M5 in a L/R configuration. Since, for space reasons, aesthetics and equipment racks, even though I could mount my OW VP 180 is at ear-level, the same couldn't be done for the M5s so they are about two-feet above that which, of course, goes against the long-time conventional wisdom that the L/C/R should be more or less lined up in a horizontal plane. Of course, if you can mount them in that same plane, so much the better.

After a few months of listening, unlike the OW VP180 which is at ear listening level, even though the M5s are above what would be considered the "sweet spot", the only frequencies that seem to drop off slightly are in the upper treble range(which can be dealt with by EQ), dispersion of the M5s in all directions is not an issue. Clearly, the fact that these speakers are designed specifically regardless of location, to go flat against the wall and nothing else, I would be interested to hear comments from the "braintrust" at Axiom as to how they might have compensated in the design in order to mitigate the limitations in set-up and locaion.

Mwahahaha!

Thank you for the responses. Flat on the wall it is!
My screen is mounted high do to the horizontal equipment rack in front of it and the current mishmash of LCR speakers on top of it. The bottom of the screen is 25.5" from the floor, I figure I can safely lower the screen 5" once I get rid of the equipment on top. The screen is mounted via a french cleat board, it won't take much to lower it. Could anyone tell me the measurement between the M5 speaker bottom and the tweeter's centre?

16 inches.

Toe Out is required in this situation using a wedge installation.