Unusual(?) spade connection

The vast majority just plop em down. A few move them to where they look good. Almost no one knows there is an actual science and method to speaker placement.

Normal first step is like you noticed, to move them around listening for the best/smoothest bass response. More bass closer to walls, tighter bass further away, and where you sit makes a difference as well. At this stage you don’t care much about precision you’re just listening for bass and bass/midrange balance.

Next step, is to listen for midrange/treble balance and imaging. First use a tape measure to make sure they are precisely equidistant to your sweet spot. Then tweak them for toe in. In your case you can also tweak the midrange/tweeters.

Then check again, this time measuring to eliminate even the tiniest fraction of an inch of being not perfectly symmetrical. I've used a framing square and string in certain situations. Because I have found as little as 1/8" to diminish image focus. Its that big a deal. 

Finally, now that you have them dialed in, you can start looking to see what if anything you might want to do in the way of treating side wall reflections. You don’t have to go all GIK there’s dirt cheap things like a folded blanket you can try, or pick up a 2x3’ panel of Owens Corning acoustic panel at the hardware store for a couple bucks. That exact same panel that costs a few bucks is what’s inside a lot of expensive panels.

Its real easy to spend thousands and thousands of dollars and not get as good results as you can get for free or cheap, with just a lot of time and effort.

Bi-wire and shotgun were the first two things I tried that convinced me to look deeper into wire. This was decades ago, back when I was using ordinary hookup wire. So it cost next to nothing to try. (Even then I was so cheap- did I really want to cut 15 ft of wire off the roll to try this unlikely idea out? Lol! Seriously!) To this day I still recommend trying the easiest/simplest/cheapest thing first just to see if it works. If the idea has any merit at all then you should be able to hear it regardless of how well its done.

But this is merely the first step. Then once you know the next is to figure out what is the best way to go about it. So once I knew cables really could make a difference the next thing was to figure out just how much and what is the best value way to go about it. In other words what you are doing, trying elevators and all these different things. 

If you keep going like this, trying a lot of different things, listening close as you can for all the differences, noticing which are better and in what way and by how much, you will very soon be looking back in wonder at how much progress you have made. This is roughly somewhere between a thousand and a million times better than read/talk/buy.

@ millercarbon - Good to know the spade thing will work.
Why is bi-wire a bad idea?

Not so much bad as poor use of funds. If you have bi-wire use it. Where it becomes a bad idea is going bi-wire. For any given amount of money you can always get better results buying a normal cable than bi-wire. So use it if you have it but don't buy it thinking its better. Its not.

Yeah, bi-wire is a bad idea. But the spade thing will work just fine.