So 4 months plus about a week and I finally was invited over to calibrate his audio (and thus Axioms). As expected, their house wasn't done (heck, still isn't "done" yet) so a delay was expected.
Anyway, he was already pretty excited about the way that his Axioms sound.
From the first post, he has:
(2) M2 v3 In-Wall Front L/R
(1) VP100 v3 In-Wall Center
(4) QS4 v3 Surrounds
And some small powered sub. I would have to ask him the model (I didn't look close enough last night). It is 10" at best if not 8" and in about a 1.5cuft box (if that).
Anyway, you already see the weakest link, but let's not go there yet.
The space is massive. A huge open space that flows into a big wet bar area, and other space (kind of dead space that I would have re-purposed if it was my house) and a large opening going upstairs.
So ok, we have a LOT of cuft of air to fill with sound.
First things first, we play a few demo clips from the blu-ray demo discs that I brought to get a "before" experience...
Then I start with the basic Audyssey MultEQ XT calibration to 8 mic locations per spec from an Audyssey "expert how-to" forum thread elsewhere on the 'net. This is just to 1) see what the room correction does, 2) shows him how to do it himself and 3) might be a quick and easy way to get a sound improvement.
Going through the setup, and everything on the right side of the room is listed as being about twice as far away from the initial mic location as it really is. This must be because the left side of the space is walled off, and the right side is open to that "dead space" and to the upstairs. We fix that as this impacts the audio delay of each channel and we want it to be correct. Then, we bump up the center channel 3.0db per his request (and common practice). And then we start putting in some demo material. We hit up some of my blu-ray demo discs and start with clips that focus on surround effects and he was blown away at how much better it sounded. I too agreed that the sound image of the surround channels was excellent. In the one Transformers battle scene, you could pinpoint the locations of just about every bullet and energy weapon blast throughout the surround channels.
Next up, the LFE section. I am worried about his little sub. We had to turn it up A LOT to get it to the "pre-Audyssey setup level" of 75db. First clip, from Iron Man, the Jericho missile scene. The "thump" of the launch is fine, and then it all goes into the crapper. It just can't handle the LFE of when the missile splits into smaller projectiles, or the explosion. It just sounded like crap. We adjusted that down quite a bit to get at least fairly clean bass.
Then we played some of the music samples on the blu-ray discs. the Eagles' "Hotel California", John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change", and REO Speedwagon's "Take it on the Run." They all sounded great in his space.
There were significant issues though that I couldn't get past. The space still had some echo to it which impacted intelligibility, but he won't be doing anything that will help that at all, which is understandable since the space is a shared family room/wet bar/etc. Also, the elephant in the room was that little sub. The one that he said he didn't want to upgrade when he bought his Axioms. I mean, the M2 and VP100 in-walls do very well despite the size of the space, but there is a distinct sound gap, no a sound hole below 80Hz because the sub just doesn't do much. It made things, though clean and clear for mids/highs, just sound "empty" overall.
I was telling him that he should let me bring over my DIY sub for a day and let him use that to see what he is missing. I told him that this would be a great way to see what a bigger and better sub would do for him. I mentioned that it wouldn't have to be as big as what I built, but something with a 12" woofer, few hundred clean watts of power, and in a little bit larger box and it would be a world of difference.
We will see if he takes me up on the offer.
All-in-all though, the littler Axiom speakers did very well. I was totally impressed with them. I still love my M60/VP180 front combo with QS8 surrounds, but the smaller speakers impressed me for a room with a lot more cuft of air than what I have. Just needs that lower end coverage from a good sub and his space will really impress the family and friends.
