Quadraspire QV60 stands in the house!

I just received the Quadraspire QV60 speaker stands to put under my Trenner & Friedl ART monitors. The QV60s are sleek, sturdy and well-built, and they were easy to assemble as well. Basically you take the two sides of the stand, attach the tops and bottom via a couple of Ikea-style wooden dowels, and then slip two pairs of screws through a threaded sleeve (the silver circles you see in the pics). Each stand only took about five minutes to assemble.

You have a choice for spikes for both the top and the bottom of the stand. I used Blu-Tack on the tops because I don't want to mar the beautiful cherry finish of the ARTs, even if it's somewhere you wouldn't ordinarily see. I want the T&Fs to remain as pristine as the day I unpacked them.

The stands are light yet stable once they are assembled, which makes it easy to play around with speaker positioning. You can knock them over sideways if you aren't careful, but for the most part they are solidly coupled to the floor.

Together, the ARTs and the QV60s are quite a stylish couple. As you see here, they are toed in toward the listening chair. I usually wind up positioning speakers so that they are facing me straight on while I'm sitting down. I'm starting to discover that the ARTs like minimal toe-in, maybe 15 degrees off the side wall maximum. This helps the soundstage to sound immense. When they are faced towards the listening chair, they can be a bit aggressive and forward-sounding. So I've been experimenting with more speaker positions than usual.

This is how I have them positioned right now. Like I said, it's about a 15 degree angle off the side wall. If I face the ARTs perfectly forward, I lose a little center fill in the soundstage.

One thing I'm noticing is that the QV60s help the ARTs to go a little bit deeper in the low frequencies. That's what you get when you couple stands to the floor. I may also try setting the ARTs closer to the back wall to see how much bass I can get from those 5" aluminum woofers.

Now it's time to start moving in the LP shelves and other furniture to make my new listening room a little less live. But overall everything is sounding quite special!

And yes, I'm going to paint those horrific green walls, too.