Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Who makes axiom drivers

I took a number off a driver from my M2 v2 and it came up as a cheap chinese knock off.Please tell me thre is more to axiom than this. Dont get me wrong ,they sound great , but i would hope i am getting more for my money than this.

They are designed in Canada and manufactured in an Axiom-owned (and Axiom quality-controlled) factory in China. Keep in mind that all drivers don't need to have overbuilt hunks of metal behind then to produce the desired characteristics. How do you think Axiom is able to get such good sound from reasonably priced speakers?

Here’s a quote from an article on an experiment done on an Axiom driver over at Audioholics:



Linked in this thread:

Axiom woofer’s bad hair day

i realize what you are saying, and it seems the only thing not made in china is us The crossover is the single most important part of a speaker.I just wanted to be sure, so i came here and asked and got reassurance. You may not know this but not everyone is honest A good part of my purchase decision was based on these speakers being canadian made.

Whoa, that was an Axiom driver? I remember reading that story before I even came to this site. I was really impressed by the abuse it took, but thought to myself that I'd never be able to afford whom ever's speaker they were talking about. I never made the connection until now.

The fact that some of the best designed products can still be made for a much cheaper production cost abroad is a sad truth of global economics.

The true, cheap knockoffs aside, we as consumers can benefit by getting high quality products at cheaper prices but as citizens we suffer the effects of jobs and local revenue being diverted to other countries.

Moral choice or economics. It's a tough call and almost impossible to stick to 100% even if you make the lifestyle choice.

I am afraid it is not much of a choice anymore, the choice was made years ago. Now, you could hardly survive if you tried to buy only US and Canadian designed and built products. Add Mexico and you could get buy, but every thing is made in Asia now.

The Harvard Business Review recenty had a great article on how the early days of cheap labor outsourcing led to the eventual need for R&D on the mfg site, which led to the movement of all intellectual design work there. Now, we don't have new ideas about semiconductors, or solar panels, etc., because over the years we asked the cheapest bidder to handle all aspects of the process.

Now we are just consumers.

Hopefully, and it will possibly take many years, the Asian workers will start demanding more money for their efforts and the cost of importing goods several thousand miles will become cost prohibitive if fuel costs go back up.

Again, factories in China are owned by China's government.

There IS more to Axiom than this.

No. While China is not a free economy, they are not so strictly controlled any more. Private ownership of all kinds of things, including factories, is now allowed. This is something that was started 20 years ago in the south of China in 'Economic Free Zones' and has gradually expanded.

As I posted on another forum, if you wind back the clock 200 years or so, this is exactly what the Brits were saying about the Yanks, cheap knock offs rip offs and all.

Time moves on. Things change...

I'm guessing Axiom's operation in China is either a Sino-Foreign Equity Joint Venture (EJV) or a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WFOE).

http://www.chinaorbit.com/china-economy/china-business.html

Time to update your info, LT61.

Each to their own but I would be willing to pay more for Axioms knowing they were made solely in North America.

I'd prefer that too, Rick, I wonder what the $$ difference would be?

It is also worth noting that, although the US was to Europe as China now is to the US, Europe did not implode. There is still manufacturing in Europe and many European countries enjoy a very high standard of living.

The US is widely regarded as the most innovative/entrepreneurial in the world. Things will turn out fine, but different.

Historically, protectionism (buy Canadian/American is a very mild form of protectionism) has been rather bad for the economies involved. It tends to support inefficiencies in an economy or sector and what ends up happening is that those inefficiencies are magnified over time.

Countries seem to go through periods of trade liberalization and protectionism and protectionist periods always end up in contraction.

::perfesser Fred leaves the podium and slinks away::

Hello Socketman,

To add a bit more detail to the information already supplied by pmbuko and others in this thread, the dual voice-coil woofers for Axiom's DSP subwoofers--the EP400, 500, 600 and 800--are hand-built at Axiom's Canadian plant in Dwight, Ontario.

The rest of our drivers (all designed in the Ontario plant) are built at Axiom China, our wholly owned plant in Shanghai. Production there is overseen by an Axiom colleagure or by Ian Colquhoun himself, who spends a significant chunk of time in Shanghai.

Regards,
Alan

And there you have it, straight from Axiom.

I've known for a while that Axiom drivers are made in China, so that's not news to me. Are there any speaker manufacturers left that use "western" factories? I doubt it. It's just economics. If I force myself to take a 'national/continental-istic' view of things, Axiom's are at least screwed together in Canada. An Axiom employee in Canada got a paycheck for doing that, so yay for North America. Economically, maybe that's a bit "better" than speakers wholly-assembled offshore. Maybe. At least it would keep currency circulating "locally", I suppose.

It is news to me though that Axiom does make at least some speaker drivers in Canada. That's interesting. Count me in as another one who would be interested in knowing what, say, an M80 would cost if its drivers were made in Canada.

For Alan, any thoughts ever of releasing a "Premium" line of Mxx's that feature hand-wound-in-Canada drivers? Just out of curiosity, I wonder how much that would add to the cost? 5%? 50%? 100%? I just have no idea. And would people pay for that if there was technically no sonic difference? I suspect that many people actually would. Who knows though....

It would be an interesting experiment for a company like Axiom to try. I hear/read so often that, "why can't X be made in North America" anymore. The answer is always cost. To which the reply is often that, "But I'd pay more if it were made in North America, rather than China". Seems like Axiom might be in a unique position to actually see if there's a market there.

Magnepan is made here in the U.S. I must note that when I talked to the them the guy told me one capacitor in the 1.6s was made it France.

Magnepans are one of a kind, that's for sure.

Yea, but I heard that one of the engineers once new a guy from China. That just ruins it for me.

You too

Hi Peter,

I suspect it would cost a lot more. A couple of years ago at the CES in Las Vegas, I stopped in to a room (Joseph Audio) to listen to a pair of speakers which from the hallway sounded quite good (it's my hallway test of accurate sound. . .). I had met Jeff Joseph, who, so far as I know, builds his own speakers in the USA, and back when I was an editor at Audio magazine, the magazine had reviewed a pair of Joseph Audio bookshelf models.

So I listened to this Joseph Audio 3-way and I thought it sounded very good--perhaps not as good as the M80s--but certainly neutral and transparent. I inquired as to the selling price of the speaker and was told $6,000 per pair. I just about fell over and thought to myself, "ridiculous".

I doubt most enthusiasts would pay the large premium that all-Canadian or all-US manufacturing would demand.

And hand-wound voice coils in fact are inferior to machine-wound, which are more accurately and evenly wound.

Cheers,
Alan

Bragging about "hand made" was never a selling point to me. I always think, "couldn't a machine do the same with greater accuracy and consistency?"

Including Chik-Fil-A's "hand spun" milk shakes. I want a robot making my shake.

Very interesting. Thanks Alan!

ClubNeon - Thanks a lot for mentioning both Chic-Fil-A and a milkshake in the same sentence. Ugh. The Slim-Fast shake I'm currently slurping down for lunch just lost quite a bit of its mojo.