Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Newbie seeking patchwork setup advice

The most important thing is getting the relative levels of sub, main and surrounds set correctly. If you're seeing a 5 db change between the Polks and Axioms (not a big surprise) probably the easiest solution is to go into your receiver settings and bump the mains up by 4 or 5 db.

Assuming that the sub/main balance was set correctly in the first place, you should be about right. If the surround levels are set too high it ends up sounding a bit "phony" -- there shouldn't be a whole lot of sound coming out of the surrounds.

I have to crank in 10 dB between my M2i fronts and my (very efficient but not particularly good) cheap tower surrounds. I ended up with vp100 center at 0dB, M2i fronts at +2dB, and cheap tower surrounds at -8dB.

When comparing speakers, remember that the louder speaker usually sounds better AND brighter, so you will need to be really careful with the volume settings when comparing the Axioms to the Polks.

[EDIT] The biggest criticism I have read about the Sony receivers is that their power ratings (like those of many receivers) are somewhat inflated so they run out of power sooner than you might expect when driving all channels.

As long as you aren't running out of power (ie clipping) I wouldn't worry about it. Being able to cross over at 80 hz would be nice but being restricted to 100hz is not that big a deal -- you might find that you need to keep the sub relatively close to the mains so that you can't easily "hear where the sub is".