Toe in is crucial

Great post. Absolutely true. I moved my speakers every week for over a year until my wife was certain I was quite mad, but at this point it does remind me of listening to music, which is all I ask.

Courage! Experiment! Play! Enjoy! If I can do it with my 165lbs speakers, you can too.

As a famous race car designer once said: "If you want to shave 100 pounds off a race car, you have to find 1,600 ways to save an ounce."

I've heard people state that, with electrostatics and planers, you need to sit, head fixed in a vice, to maintain a balanced image and stage. I've found, with both my Quad ESL 63s and my Magnepans, that, with a great deal of attention to placement and especially toe in, I can achieve a large, well maintained image and stage, even when setting or standing, well out of the sweet spot. 

Great conversation. Thanks. I think a really good point is how toe-in in a given room and based on one’s one preference can significantly deviate from a manufacturers recommendation. If I recall SF Amati are recommended to be toed in direct at the listing position. For me, while this does create greater imaging, the sound stage decreases significantly, and the vocals become too defined in space, and treble a bit strident (despite having Mc equipment and a tube pre).

My starting point is probably having the tweeters shoot past my shoulders, then ¼-½ adjustment out seems to be a good spot for now. Maintain a decent imaging, but the soundstage just opens up and envelopes the room. 
 

Truly for me, the change is more profound than switching up cables, and depending on the price point could rival the change of a DAC. At one point I was feeling my DAC was too sharp and went through an odyssey of different DACs. I wish I had understood then, that the first thing I should have done was to adjust the toe-in.

Lesson learned!

I currently have a (broken in) loaner pair of SF Amanti G5’s and after they set them up as they were instructed to, there was no depth and and the top end was muted. They said that they took a 12 hour course on how to set them up. After they left, I spent a couple of hours moving the G5’s around and now there is a soundstage and some depth.Still don’t have wife approval yet to spend that kind of money, but it’s looking like she’s going to give in. At least I'll still have the painters tape to use as guide lines when the new pair comes.😀