I was experimenting with toe-in last night and apparently I haven't been toeing my 7XRS MK2's in nearly enough. I'd suggest starting VERY toed in and then working back out until you find the optimum position... as in toed to the point that you can't see the inside sides of the speakers from your listening position at all.
I did this and everything came together in a way that I hadn't heard the Omegas come together before. It was basically the same experience that I had at a local hifi shop where they were showing me how big of a difference their setup and speaker positioning can make using a pair of Vienna Acoustics floor-standers. With the Viennas it was a dramatic improvement, basically going from "who in their right mind would spend $5k on these speakers" to "oh yeah, that's what $5k speakers should sound like".
With the Omegas it was a combination of 2/3'rds better and 1/3'rd different, I could really hear the speakers working together and their sound waves intertwining... it was a fuller presentation with more depth, but with a bit less air and detail. Until this point I've been very happy with the detail, clarity and soundstage with the Omegas, but I was feeling like they simply weren't capable of putting enough meat on the bone in my 3,840 cu ft space. Now that I seem to be over that hump, I need to play with the placement some more tonight (and with a wider variety of music) and see if toeing them back out ever so slightly brings back a touch of the air and detail without losing too much of the fullness and depth.
Regardless, it was a very cool and unexpected moment.
This has proven to be an incredibly helpful post to me! Up until now, I have been using my Super Alnico monitors with almost no toe-in at all, maybe 2 or 3° at the most, in other words, hardly anything. It occurred to me that while I was getting a very large and broad sound stage this way, things sounded a little too diffuse and the imaging was a little vague. So I tried this suggestion, starting with a rather extreme toe-in position (not being able to even see the inside cabinet walls) and then gradually rotating them out. Somewhere around a 15 to 20° of toe in, everything just snapped into focus! Low-end response tightened up, imaging got much sharper and more "substantial" and the depth of the soundstage got much bigger. Golly!
Another thing I am pleased to say is that repositioning the speakers in this way has smoothed out a bit of "hotness" on the top end that had me scratching my head. Somehow, listening a bit more on axis to those drivers evened out the frequency response.
The result is that many recordings now sound astonishingly good. I am particularly blown away by well recorded live performances, in which the sense of the venue acoustics is conveyed in a way that is spooky-real.
Happy camper, here! Sometime during the next month, by the way, I am going to post a review of the Super Alnico Monitor on my audio blog, and I will post a link here when it's live.
Thanks a lot for the help, gang.