I've been helpng my neighbor choose a system for his newly remodeled living room. I brought him to a few local places to listen to speakers, and out of the brands we listened to, he really liked the Paradigm Studio 40's, but can't afford them. After reading the great reviews for Axiom, and the fact that the Mansfield veneer is a great match for his new room, he pulled the trigger and bought M22's, VP150 and the QS8's. We hooked them up to a Yamaha HTR-5590, no sub as he's still deciding what he wants. His room is very large, 20'w x 25'D and the ceiling slopes from 9' up to 18'. It's open to the kitchen in the back, and a dining room in the back corner as well. Listening position is about 15' from the speakers and there's a rug over the hardwood floor.

To put it simply, the system doesn't sound "alive." It sounds kind of hollow and muted to both of us, both with music and movies. There's no life to it. His wife commented that they sounded like "boom box speakers." I wouldn't go that far, but honestly both of us feel like they should sound much better. He has a pair of large, no name speakers as well, so I hooked them up to compare, they had more bass, less clarity, but taking away the low end response there was not a dramatic difference like there should be.

I decided to bring my receiver over, a Pioneer VSX 811 to see if maybe the receiver was the problem. It sounded different, but not really better or worse. So I brought over my sub, a SVS 25-31CS+ along with my trusty Adcom 555II to power the sub bridged. Well, it definitely helped, especially with all speakers set to small, but still it doesn't sound right. The only way I was able to acheive reasonable results was to us my Pioneer as pre, and power the M22's full range with the Adcom. Then we noticed a difference, the overall response was far better, though still a bit short of expectations. Perhaps some of it is us expecting too much, I'm not sure. I know the M22's are small for the room, but budget constraints are why he got them over the M60's. One note, the QS8's sound very good, but then that's surround duty so it's hard to evaluate them on the same level.

What else can we try? I've tried adjusting a number of settings on the receiver, along with listening in different positions and heights relative to them to no avail. There's not a lot of space to move them around because of furniture and even still I don't think it would open up the sound THAT much. At this point, what options are there? Is it the receiver, or maybe he just has to get the M60's? Any advice would be helpful as I'd hate for him to have to ship them back.....

Thanks,
Kevin