Good Monday morning,

I have what I qualify as a “privilege” for having been part of Axiom’s organization for the past seven (7) years. I know that even if my evaluation might be partial there are solid facts which can’t be ignored and a track record to prove it. Axiom’s goal of extracting from an audio speaker its maximum performance based on scientific premises at an affordable cost for the average consumer while maintaining a quality construction and reliability.

The well deserved praise won by the Axiom M80 over the years makes it a tough act to follow. As I have reported before, I have personally audition speakers costing much more that had an overall performance inferior to it. I, for one, have absolutely no doubts that the M100 will raise the bar.

Furthermore, the excitement which I’m experiencing is not only due to the coming M100 but also about Ian’s comment concerning the repercussions on the other Axiom speaker models. I think that some have already forgotten Ian’s post several pages back and when you know Ian as well as I do . . . there is absolutely no hype in his comment.
It is worth reading it over, slowly, once more . . . (I'll save you the trouble of looking for it ; here it is)

Originally Posted By: Ian
For now I would like to add that this new product has been just a fantastic journey in the making. Though the early beginnings go back about 10 years, it really began in earnest a few years ago when Andrew and I had the first opportunities to hang out and chat about our prior experiences and experiments. It became apparent rather quickly that our combined experiences could be put together to create a whole new direction for a speaker design. As a base we had all the experiments that we had done over the years that had netted similar results, even though they were being done in separate laboratories and without any collusion back and forth. This brought some real clarity to a plethora of elements about speaker design. Of course a lot of these experiments were pretty mainstream anyway so similar results would be expected but there were also quite a number that were not. Added to this we had the experiments we had done that were in totally different directions. Here we had the opportunity to collaborate and develop new experiments.

I guess if I had to boil it down to the two most prominent and broad categories that we were collaborating on it would be the utilization of DSPs and the utilization of omni-directional design. These two main foundations, plus a multitude of other ideas and experiences, could now be used to carve out some totally new territory. As with all things Axiom this new direction had to ultimately prove itself out in Double Blind Listen Testing. For Andrew the Double Blind Test was nothing new since it was very much in keeping with the methodology followed at API. I guess given the early roots of both Axiom and API at the NRC this is not surprising.

So after all these years we are now just about ready to unveil the first product of this research. I might add that along with our new speaker model will be the ability to juice the performance of some of our existing models. From a timing point of view we are currently building the prototypes for the show and should be done sometime in the next few weeks. It is our plan to take a pile of photos and post them here when those samples are completed. I think once we have this visual would be a sensible time to start going over the details.



jc