10 feet seems a little wide to me as well, but I've never had any inclination nor reason not to take TLSGuy's opinion as valuable... at the very least you would likely want to toe in your speakers, right TLS?
On a side note, looking through the manual that comes with your speakers should yield you at least a starting point on how to properly set up your speakers. Some speaker manufacturers really spell it all out for you. Look there first, if anyone should know, one would think it would be the makers of that particular speaker.
I have been out of this discussion for a while, as we had a big wedding this weekend. My youngest son and the last of my four children was married. I got back to Benedict yesterday, to find another 18 inches of snow on the ground. The old JD Model A had a two hour work out heaping up snow banks and grading. So far we have had 48 inches of snow in April so far!
If the speakers are close together, there is poor depth of field. You really need at least an 8 ft spacing to get a nice left right spread and good depth. This is very important for classical reproduction. Obviously smaller rooms will not permit that. However I would rather have greater spacing and a speaker nearer the side wall, than the speakers too close together. A spacing greater than 14 ft will give most speakers problems getting a smooth spread between the speakers. I have my speakers 9 ft apart as that is what the room allows. In my last house the speakers were 12 ft apart as the room was bigger.
Siegfried Linkwitz listed speakers too close together as one of the commonest factors limiting good audio reproduction, in a recent AES paper. I could not agree more. I see a lot of speakers in members pictures posted on these forums, that in my opinion show speakers too close together.
As far as toe, this is something that requires experiment. In very small rooms I have often found it beneficial to cross the speaker axes in front of the listening position.
If the speakers have a good off axis response that mirrors the axis response, I usually find I toe that puts the speakers a little off axis works best. That seems to give the best blend of direct speaker radiation and the reverberant field in most rooms.
As another thought, I think having a screen has encouraged closer speaker placement than in the days prior to HT. I wonder if people like there sound stage matching the visual perspective.
I know in my rig, that although I have a 52 inch plasma, that is the optimal size for the viewing distance according to accepted practice, the sound stage is much larger than the visual one. There is to me a disconnect here. However since most of the time the screen is off, I want the huge sound stage.
I have to say that audio realism is of a considerably higher magnitude than visual realism. It seems video technology has a long way to go to catch audio technology for that sense of being there.
I seems to me the thrill of HT is 90% at least audio realism at least, and 10% at best to the video.
