"they are made to lay on their side" - If your owners manual says that, it's wrong - not just me that says that, I just got a couple of Phillip Newell's books (he's designed and built around 200 studios, designs speakers, does vibration analysys, etc - one of his books confirmed my theory that laying nearfields on their side was NOT a good idea.
What happens is this; speakers on their sides, you dead center between them, there are three triangles at work here - the obvious one, equilateral, left/right/your head. Then there are two others, each an Isosceles triangle with points at woofer, tweeter, and ear. If you move your head to the side to make an adjustment, you've just changed the length of the sides of that triangle, which changes the phase relationship between woofer and tweeter. Not only that, but you've changed it the OPPOSITE way for the OTHER ear. (This is real - phasing at higher frequencies can be detected with as little as 1/4" shift in path lengths, sometimes even less)
Your head doesn't move UP and DOWN near as much, so if the woof and tweet are above each other, the phase relationship between them doesn't change when you move your head from side to side.
Mr. Newell also states that usually the main reason for laying nearfields on their side is to get them out of the path of the soffit-mounted mains - and that THAT doesn't work either, it only makes extra early reflections in the sound path for the mains, making them sound worse, making people put even MORE choices of nearfields on the bridge, etc...
The only nearfileds I know of that wouldn't have this problem are the concentrics such as some by Tannoy... Steve
