odd question about stand-mount speakers

@waytoomuchstuff LOL

One of the speakers I'm interested in is the Graham Audio LS8/1 ($10k), designed by Derek Hughes, the son of the engineer who designed some famous BBC speakers. The LS8/1 got a very positive review in TAS (if anyone's interested, the review has a lot of fascinating info in it:  https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/graham-ls8-1-loudspeaker/). So I emailed Graham Audio and got the following reply directly from Derek:

There is no reason why the speaker could not be used upside down, it will not harm it. Interestingly, the BBC often used to used their BC1 speakers inverted when they were used near field, so yes that should be fine.

You can safely try the speaker in the inverted setup to see if it sounds good that way.  If the speaker was designed to be used with the woofer below, even if you maintain the same tweeter height and axis, the sound will be different because the distance between the woofer to the floor (at to the ceiling) has changed.  That change in distance will affect the frequency at which the woofer's sound bouncing off the floor will interact with the direct signal from the woofer (the floor bounce path is longer, so the interaction means the two paths are partially out of phase).  Some designers account for floor bounce in the design of the crossover, or various things are done to voice the speaker correctly which at least partially takes into account floor bounce.  

Just do it and don’t worry. You most likely will have no issues. Time alignment (if it was even considered in the design) on wee speakers will not be greatly affected and floor bounce off a stand mount is not factored in and doesn't give a boundary reinforcement thus is a non-issue.

Johnk,

I agree with you; most likely it would not adversely affect the sound.  I was merely raising a theoretical consequence of locating the woofer differently.