Tír Na HiFi

A few weeks ago I read a comment from Bruno Putzeys of Hypex fame (at least, I think it was he) saying that he didn't understand why people didn't go for more extreme toe-in of their speakers. He suggested having them cross well in front of the listening position for some sound acoustical reasons or other which I've completely forgotten. In any case, I tried it with the Kharmas and I thought it worked really well, and now I've tried the same with the Elipsas and again it's really improved both the tonal balance and image depth.

Given my 100% success rate (!) I thought I should share this info. Anyone else doing this?

I would have thought that it would be very room dependent, how close to side walls the speakers are and whether said walls are highly reflective or tend to break up the sound. I usually have some degree of toe-in but not having the tweeters pointing right at me.

Try it and see you how get on. Go beyond the point where tweeters are pointed straight at you and increase the toe even further. It looks strange, I'll grant you, but I like the effect. I always thought more toe squashed the soundstage but for some reason going beyond the "straight at you" point seems to bring it back again.

I'm sure it really IS room dependent, but it's working well for me and taking some of the room out of the equation. In my case, that's DEFINITELY a good thing.

Having heard the benefits of moving my speakers a few cm to firm up and centre images I can well believe that toe in could make a huge difference and potentially positive if it removes/delays reflections. Only negative is having to move heavy speakers and related room treatments around to capture new reflection points. I'm tempted to tive it a try although I can visualise myself shunting speakers back and forth by a cm each time well into the night.

Yeah, but it keeps us off the streets, eh? LOL.

Yep and with my speakers it could almost be classed as my recommended daily excercise.

Have you noticed any change in low end room interaction? I have these fairly well moped up with bass traps/panels but firing the woofers diagonally across the room must do something?

Actually, it seems to deepen the bass and make it slightly more uniform. I *think* in my case it's because I'm close to the side walls so the rear ports are actually giving some reinforcement as they bounce the bass off the sides. I also think it's reducing (to a small extent) longitudinal room modes. In earlier positions I'd hear way more bass on some positions than others, and it was particularly noticeable that when I stood up the bass increased dramatically. This way round, that's not so pronounced and they seem to just sound that bit smoother.

My stacked 57's are around 45 degrees compared to back wall. Tweeter (middle) pointed exactly into the ear (left speaker - left ear.....).
This way I get best details, huge soundstage and a sniper focus. I call that "headphone position".
Some people doesn't like this kind of setup, but that's my favourite.

Ok I'm going to give it a shot over the next day or so and report back. Something is nagging away in the back of my mind about a commercial signal processor that effectively added some of the left channel signal to the right channel and vice versa to add to the spaciousness of recordings or somesuch (?) I know this was done with the old headroom headphone processing for a different reason but I also seem to remember one of the audio rags looking at an expensive signal processor and saying how what it did was effectively like turning your speakers the way you describe above. Maybe I'm dreaming.

Tried it today and I was surprised and impressed. The soundstage seemed to me to reduce to "between the speakers" but the central performance was very smooth, clear and steady. Listening to a performance was very coherent but I missed the impression of width.
Chord Hugo allows an element of left/right crossfeed aimed at headphone users , I haven't tried it but maybe it has a similar effect.