Grrrrr...!!!

Okay, here's the deal: my wife and I are planning to purchase a pair of QS4's in a few months. Our couch is flush against the wall. Above the couch we have these four oriental prints that she loves. Anyway, I'm telling her for optimum sound we gotta place the speakers on either side of the prints about a foot above our ears. She says, "NO WAY, it would totally ruin the decor of the room blah blah blah..." (don't worry, we love each other, no immanent divorce here or anything.) She wants to mount the speakers down low about six inches or so below ear level, kinda behind our lamp and a CD rack, so that they're more inconspicuous. Is that gonna suck as far as sound quality goes? Are ambient sounds gonna sound real unnatural because they're coming from below ear level instead of above? Or are the QS4's forgiving enough that it won't sound that weird?

Thanks all, JT

My QS4s are suspended from the ceiling, and I have enormous difficulty imagining how they could possibly sound better than they already do.

At the end of the day you need to keep the wife happy or your new toy's will stop coming into the house. You are however a little low as far as speaker placement goes but I honestly doubt it will hurt the performance to much. I played with location on my old QS8's and it made little diff. I was 7 feet off the ground, then 5, then dam near had them a foot off the floor and it all worked.

Don't sweat it!

Yeah, mine are about 3 inches from the ceiling, due to the construction of our living room and WAF. Doesn't hurt 'em much... I'd be more worried about forward-backward positioning than height.

Better thought. Mount prints in another room. QS4's good...prints bad. Just tell her that you would be concerned that when the volume gets up and your sub starts to rumble that you would not want anything to happen to those great prints...

How about mounting them lower (so as to please your wife), but then angling the speakers a little bit, so that the side firing tweeters on the inside are aimed a little above teh listening area? The speakers on the other side will fire a little down a bit (they'll be firing away from you anyway in your set-up - so all that you'd hear from them is the refracted soudn to begin with). The woofers on teh top and bottom will still be firing up and down, but again at an angle. This may make the sound appear to come from a little higher than it actually is.

I don't know how mounting them will go. You'd have to be careful not to angel them too much so that they don't fall off the mounts - but I would think that the speakers woudl be heavy enough to stay put.