Final Conclusions…

Would I buy Axioms again? Well, I guess that's the crux of how I feel about them, and I would not only say yes, I would also say that I would have to have quite a bit more money to budget for my Home Theater for me to even be tempted to buy something other than Axiom. I would first be looking at a 7.1 system with M80s and two of the new subs! Maybe a $20,000 speaker budget would open my eyes to other brands, but if I wanted to keep it under 8,000, I might not find better than what I outlined above!

And the "brightness"? Well, I'm not sure how you go about designing a speaker that offers the level of detail that these Axioms do without also exposing bad recordings. If you keep peeling off those veils on a recording, you're either going to find something amazing underneath, or you're going to wish that you kept it veiled! Personally, I'd rather have the detail exposed. It's just a shame that so many popular music recordings are engineered poorly…because when you put on a good recording, these speakers just sing.

I had always hoped to own some really, nice, exotic speakers someday. Now, I realize I've found the sound of those really nice speakers without the exotic price. Yes, I'm a happy camper.

There's still work for me to do to try to improve my room. That's OK, it should be an interesting experience and I'm now going to settle back on the "setup" a bit and just enjoy the system. Here and there when I'm looking to be distracted on some Saturday or Sunday, I'll pull out the RS meter and tweak diffusers, absorbers, and maybe move the speakers an inch or two and plot the response.

After all, it's fun to own a Home Theater but it's also fun to try to improve one too. I'll keep my Axioms, thank you, and my Denon receiver and my Samsung. For everything else and I'm open to suggestions!

Final Note:
I created a test disc of tones with frequencies from 16Hz to 20Khz at 1/3 octave intervals (and extra tones in the bass region) and custom plotting sheets and graphs such as those that I've used in this post. If you would like a copy of these, PM me with your mailing address (for the CD) and e-mail address (for .PDFs of the papers) and I'll be glad to send you a copy of each.

For Photoshop users:
The graph itself is available as a .PSD file. The huge advantage of this is that the basic template is one layer and notes and individual plots can be on separate layers. This facilitates your being able to look at some plots and not others, as well as doing some other customizing. For instance, there's a "grid" layer that makes it much quicker to find the coordinates to place a point, and afterwards, you can reduce the transparency of this layer to make the scale subtle or disappear entirely. The "scale" on the right of the charts is also "floating", meaning you can move it into your field if view as you work on the plotting, and move it off to the side (or remove it entirely) when you're done.

Anyway, if you're a PS user and would like this file as well, just let me know.


::::::: No disrespect to Axiom, but my favorite woofer is my yellow lab :::::::