The idea of taking the blind test seems very simple. You go into a listening room, play some music, and switch back and forth between two(or more) sets of speakers and then record differences or preferences by way of a 1 to 10 rating(in Axiom's case) in various qualities of the speaker sonics...bass, treble ect. It sounds simple in theory, but in fact it's quite difficult as many of us talked about after the test. What I preferred on one track, may not have been preferred on the other and visa versa. How to convey the differences you are hearing was extremely difficult to put into words, at least for me it was. I couldn't decide for instance, if the difference I was hearing in the highs of one speaker vs the other was because there was more detail, more extention, less distortion ect or because one may have had slightly rolled off highs for instance.
I'll admit that I went into this test without an open mind, which is a NO-NO...I was convinced Ian would be playing us an MxxV2 vs an MxxV3 so I pretty much went in the listening room thinking I was hearing two Axiom speakers. What I heard was two very detailed, enjoyable speakers with very pleasant sound characteristics and though I heard subtle differences in the two, I kept going back and forth between which I preferred...remember, in my head I'm thinking I'm listening to V2's and V3's of an Axiom speaker....in the end, I indeed thought they were very close on performance and summed it up as Alan would say..."similarly good".
Which leads to the conclusion, if you were going to buy a pair of speakers(bookshelf in this case) that sounded "similarly good", do you want to spend $2300+ on a pair and tell your friends how much you spent(bragging) on some great sounding speakers, or would you rather tell your friends how much you saved(-$2000 in this case) on some great sounding speakers. To me, the answer is easy.
