(Micah, how'd Steve ever get you guys to leave! ;o)
Haha, well Steve is an incredibly nice guy, he never once hinted that it was time for us to leave or anything of that nature (hell they even offered us to join them for lunch as we were leaving). But you see Steve doesn't get home much, so I realized time with his family is very precious. Therefore there was no way I was going to stay there any longer than what we had originally discussed, I didn't want to impose on his quality time any more than I had to. Now say he and his wife and kids were to have fallen ill with some mysterious sickness while we were there then sure, I would have definately voluntereed to stay and nurse them back to good health over the next couple of years... but that wasn't the case (darn it)!
Lol, ok all kidding aside... I wanted to briefly discuss some interesting aspects of Steve's system. Like he pointed out before while we were listening to the music/movies we were listening to it at 100+ db's for most of the audition. But had Steve not had an SPL meter right in front of my face I may not have believed it! This isn't a knock on his set-up or his room in any way mind you, it's just that the music was so clean and free of any distortion what-so-ever that the volume was very deceiving. The only time I would really notice how loud it actually was, was when I would start to mention something to Steve and I couldn't hear myself talk even though I was practically screaming at him!!!
The music played flat as a ruler across the entire bandwidth spectrum. The transition from M80 to EP800 was completely seamless. He could have hidden the 800's and told me that all the sound was coming out of the M80's and I would never have been able to tell otherwise. I had him play 'All the Kings Men' on purpose because it's a full range song that really tests speaker systems to the max and will point out what ever weak links you might have... the Axioms breezed throught that song without ever breaking a sweat, I was damn impressed! Now keep in mind Steve explained to me that his EP800's were not turned up all that much. He has his system tuned very musically, and it shined in that catagory. There was nothing over powering at all in any aspect of the delivery. The bass was very tight and authoritive, without drowning out the mids and highs. Same with the tweeters, they delivered the highs without ever SCREAMING at you. I could see where some people might come out of that demo not being tremendously impressed with the fact that he had $4000 dollars worth of subwoofers performing in there. But if you wanted more bass, it's definately availible. It's just that Steve isn't a 'bass head', he prefers his music to be accurate, and I can't imagine it being anymore accurate than what he has now.
He also demonstrated Audessey, and we both agreed that his normal settings (we were listening in 5.1) sounded much better than when Audessey was running things. Audessey seemed to muffle the music somehow, kinda hard to explain. But when he turned it back normal the sound field opened up a lot more... I wasn't too keen on the Audessey. Maybe in some systems it would improve things, but certainly not in Steve's case.
