I truly believe we're talking about *incremental* changes, so imo people should keep their perspective in this regard. I was thinking along the lines of what Dean has brought up a couple of posts ago. If you were to compare Ti's to the V3's I'm sure that most people could say "there is a noticeable difference" if they AB'd them, where someone who compares speakers through just 1 step or change like a V2 to V3, may notice a more subtle if any difference(to the less accurate ear).
This is no different than the incremental changes that Paradigm makes to their lineup every couple of years. The Studio line is on "V6" afaik...someone comparing the V5 to V6 may hardly notice any audible difference, change that to a V1 or V2 to a comparo with the V5 or V6 and I'm sure you'd get most people agreeing on the differences.
Most of this "flap" is reg the over-the-top anonymous review....we don't have any idea what the persons benchmark was.
Excellent perspective Adrian. It was this very incremental improvement process that lead me to buy my M80 center a couple years ago, long before I needed it. I didn’t want to get caught by the improvement process causing enough of a change in the M80s that I would notice the difference with my older ones. Just got lucky that I could actually use it back then. And no w/o looking at the serial numbers I could tell which is which.
Now had I bought my speakers from many other manufactures they likely would have announced a new model and had a clearance on any of the old stock so in all likelihood I would have had warning of the changes and been informed enough if not able to act accordingly. Knowing about Axiom’s incremental improvement process allowed me to anticipate this.
OTOH had I just recently bought towers instead of a pair of surround and pair of bookshelf speakers I would have been quite miffed not to receive an accessory pack with spikes. How many of us read the details of the product pages having been around for some time, or in the case of a new customer had some speakers in the cart for some time before deciding to pull the trigger.
I had expected that these sort of changes would be vetted through the customer council which having a customer’s perspective would have caught some of these PR issues and prevented them causing confusion. Not knowing the councils actual mandate I may have been mistaken.
I submit that because of Axioms constant incremental product improvement process that they would benefit from maintaining on the website the equivalent of a software “change log.” There is already a perfect place for it as a “sticky” at the top of the “What’s New At Axiom” sub-forum which actually misses talking about most of what is new. Having a separate change log would leave open individual threads for major developments like a new model release such as the VP180, or announcements of version number updates.
I really think that Axiom should consider implementing something like this for no other reason that to create a focal point for progress reporting which may in turn help prevent updates to the web page being missed and other PR issues from arising.
Just a thought,
Dean
