Can I suspend / hang speakers?

Poor Issac must be spinning in his grave! Yes, the voice coil will push with equal force on the driver cone and on the speaker enclosure, but Newton also came up with F = M*A, which tells us that movement of the massive enclosure will be tiny.

The only drawback to hanging speakers by chains is cosmetic. If the wife agrees, go for it.

The movement of the enclosure will indeed be small, but given the generally universally accepted goal of rigidly mounting speakers, why in the world would you hang them in space, to let them move (swing) on their own? Imagine a recording with bass almost entirely in one channel, with large excursions of the woofer and small excursions on the other side, sending the imaging info all to !@#$. Remember that our ears/brains use millisecond delays to localize sound. YOu would't consider mounting speakers on a columnar spring which could move around in response to the driver motions; isn't this similar to what you are considering by hanging them? Maybe one of our speaker designer/builders could chime in. Maybe my intuition is completely wrong here.

Swampwalker, be carefull of intuition and "common sense", they are what people use to explain that heavier objects fall faster than light ones.
The movement caused by the counter movement of the speakers can be calculated to be virtually, if not literally, nil.

inpenin- I agree with your comment on intuition. Point made. However, I do not believe that allowing a speaker to move freely in space (even a small amount) is beneficial to good sound. I must admit I will NOT hang my 90 lb Merlins from the ceiling when they arrive to experiment.

Ok, has anyone done the math? I'm no physicist, but can't you figure out the force caused by the displacement of air for a single note, the force caused by the movement of the voice coil, and, based on the weight of the speaker, figure out how much reverse displacement would be caused? Wouldn't that give you a damping factor? Granted, its probably totally ballpark, but I'm guessing to would not be "virtually ... nil."

I'm curious, because of my experience with my old ProAc RS2s. They sounded awful until I mounted them on the recommended Target sounds, and then they sounded awesome.