Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Thinking about tinkering with the M80's...

Not the insides or anything like that, but the front feet height. I did a bunch of moving around with them a month or so back (did a thread about speaker placement), and found what I feel is the optimal placement for them up front. However there was some mention from an otherwise unmentionable troll by the name of Solid State about raising them up on milk crates, and how much better they sounded. I probably wouldn't have even thought twice about that being at all something I would try out, but then Grunt chimmed in and said he discovered this long ago and wrote about it in detail years ago.

So this got me thinking, does anyone here have their M80's, M60's or M50's pointing upward at all? Mine are sitting parallel to the floor right now, but it just occured to me that they send those little spacers with them in the feet kit. So I could experiment with placing one or two spacers in the front feet, therefore raising the front up just a bit. This might have a similar effect to placing them on milk crates (not something I really want in our sales room/home theater... speakers sitting on milk crates), though obviously not the exact same effect as the reflections will react quite differently.

However even if it's not all that similar to the milk crate thing, it still may improve the dynamics. So if you have your floor speakers tilted up at all, or have tried them that way and didn't like it, tell us about it. I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about this in here yet. That's not to say it hasn't been covered before, I just wasn't a part of that discussion if there was one. I will be experimenting with putting a spacer or two under the M80's here shortly and will post my thoughts afterwards.

I just thought I'd throw this question out there while I was thinking about it.

Sounds like an interesting experiment. I’ve never angled them up as my seating was never above the tweeter level before but it is now so I might also try it. I discovered that my M80s sounded better elevated in my apartment by accident when I placed a pair of M22s upside down on top of them to do an A/B comparison. I was shocked at how much better the M22s sounded. So I thought the only thing different was that they were higher up. So I put my M80s on milk crates and they now sounded as good as the M22s.

There were only three things I could figure were coming into play. One was that I was decoupling them from the floor. Second was that raising all the drivers was giving them better dispersion. In part because the tweeters were now above furniture level so I was getting more ambience and raising the woofers away from the floor was allowing more of there sound to disperse w/o bouncing off or being absorbed by the carpeted floor.

Since then I have found that I also just plain prefer to have the tweeters on all my speakers slightly above ear level (yes Dean commits another audio heresy ).

Cheers,
Dean

I have my M80's angled up slightly. I have the rubber feet on the back and the spikes on the front backed out of the holes a few turns. I think it helps raise the soundstage a bit. It could be psychological though?

Hi Micah and all,

It's an interesting subject, "soundstage height", and worth playing around with. I thought I'd written something in our newsletters about this, but I couldn't find it, however, I came across a reference to it in what I wrote about stand heights for bookshelf speakers:

"For reasons I've never fully understood, I don't like sitting in balconies, looking downwards on a performance or performers. I'm more accustomed to being seated on the main floor of a theater, watching the performers on a stage at the same level or slightly higher up. Even as a teen-ager (apart from the balcony hi-jinks), I never liked looking down at a movie screen. Consequently I like the soundstage even with or a bit higher, and 24-inch stands accomplish this."

It's certainly personal and it's one of the advantages of bookshelf speakers plus a sub, because you can easily play with the height factor.

Certainly when you raise or lower the position of any speakers, floorstanding or bookshelf, or even tilt them back or toe them in or out, an entirely different combination of direct and reflected sounds comes into play, so they'll sound different and the soundstage may well widen or become less wide. Whether you prefer that over a different placement is up to you. I tend to like a higher soundstage, which I get from my M22s on 24-inch stands, but when I switch to the floorstanding M80s using the same music, I find I accommodate the lowered soundstage fairly quickly.

Worth experimenting, for sure.

Regards,
Alan

I know a few people who tilt their speakers back a bit in order to "time-align the drivers". No idea if it helps; conventional wisdom seems to be that ears aren't particularly sensitive to phase information. With M60s I found a slight preference when they were raised a bit, but M80s are already taller so maybe not an issue there.

Axiom, 4-point Hydraulic Lifters FTW !!

I personally like one of the old timers from here on the board who had his 80s hung from the ceiling and angled down towards the listening area ... said they *really* brought Stevie Ray Vaughan's tone to life. I believe the same fella had an infinite baffle subwoofer in that room.

That is one system I would have truly loved to have listened to.

I found the biggest improvement when I 'decoupled' my M60's from the floor by using the rubber feet instead of the spikes (floor is carpeted). I have considered getting something like the Gramma I have under my sub. This would raise the speakers a few inches, but the main purpose would be further decoupling....

n00b question: Why does "decoupling" a speaker from the floor improved the sound?

Thansk
snazzed

It helps by isolating the speaker from the floor, sonic vibrations don't get transferred through the cabinet to the floor.