Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners New M80's

Yes, that would work. I would change the setting first, though. A lot cheaper.

Changing the settings should work. Then with the money saved from not buying an amp you can get the EP500 fixed.

Using any external amp will take a huge load off the receiver and would stop the shut downs, as you are no longer using the internal amps and reducing the load created by them. The early XPA series in the past, didn't play overly well with the M80s, but that appears to have been resolved with the latest offerings.

The XPA-3 would definitely drive your front speakers much easier than the Onkyo receiver. M80s are a hard load for many receivers to drive, get the Emotiva!

as i said in my first post, i will write some updates, once in a while, about the M80 sound.

i just listened to a CD which i had not played for quite a bit of time and which, if one wants good uncompressed reproduction from it, one better have speakers that can take lots of power and a good amp because the last minutes of the piece are a real blast, hitting you with everything the orchestra has.

the piece is Ravel's Bolero, with the MSO, Charles Dutoît, on Decca, a digital recording.

the sound was crystal clear from beginning to end, with no audible distortion and/or compression anytime during the whole piece, even though the end was overpowering in it's effect. (played at "live" levels)

when i had listened to it on my Energy 22 Ref., i could hear a bit of compression near the end, and so a bit of distortion too; the Energy's were pushed to the limit of their capacity.

i used to have an oscilloscope to check what was happening on my sound system; extrapolating from my notes re. playing this piece on the Energy speakers, i can estimate that the amp was now giving about 475-500 peak Watts to the M80s, maybe less, but not my much.
had my amp not been able to produce that much power, the peaks would have been clipped and there would have been some distortion.

i was so impressed by the quality of the reproduction with the M80s that many times during the audition i had tears in my eyes.

very impressive indeed!

Odd! I have only ever shut down my Onkyo 3007 once when I first bought it to test how well it could handle my 3 M80s up front and QS8 surround and rears. I played GOA Trance music with a very intense bass beat in all channel stereo for 30 minutes at 100dB and then switched to 2ch stereo for another hour and a half at 100 dB and everything was fine. To test it’s limits I finally bumped it up to 105 dB and it shut down about 5 minutes later. Since then I’ve never had any shutdowns of my 3007 at any sane listening levels.

FYI all SPL measurements were 12 feet from the M80s.

JB, I also have the Dutoit Ravel performances, and certainly agree that the Bolero can give your speakers a good workout in certain passages. Now, although you hadn't played it and presumably the other Ravel works "for quite a bit of time", you can enjoy this wonderful music more often with your M80s.

Greg, a couple more points. Since we don't know the cause of the "protection mode problem" yet, there's no purpose in discussing spending more money on a guess.

You say that the EP500 line-level inputs "don't work", but do you mean that the external input jack is broken? If so, the output jack works just as well to input the voltage, since it's connected to an internal "Y" arrangement which leads into the sub amp.

The closest approach to your request for comparative results using the lower impedance setting would be in the December S&V test results for the 1008 . Although your 3008 has a bit stronger amplifier section and should handle the M80s with even greater ease when properly set up, the effects of using the 4ohm setting are clearly shown, and would be similar in your case. Note that in one and two channel tests the 4ohm results of 272 and 229 watts were reduced to 65 and 45 watts at the 4 ohm setting. This may not be the only cause for the problem, but voluntarily cutting the voltage output capability certainly doesn't help, and this setting should never be used.

I don't know what specifically is broken. Back when I bought the EP500, I posted here about the problem, and was told about plugging into the line-level output jack. So I did try that.

I don't understand what these tests of clipping have to do with whether the impedance setting causes the receiver to go into protection mode.