Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo The big showdown: M40 vs M50 vs M80 (VERY LONG)

Really enjoyed that, krs. And yes, being one of, I'm sure, a very few who has compared those 3 speakers, your contribution, though subjective, is a valuable one. Thanks.

great little review there krs. i do belive you might be the first person to do an actual A/B test with 22's, 40's and 60's. thanks for sharing your findings.

i hope the 60's continue to be as satisfying for you as they are now.

bigjohn

Thanks! I really did like the m40's, and I think if you spend most of your time watching movies, the m40's more than meet the task. And when I listened to some rock, electronica, and trip-hop music, I could hardly notice any difference between the m40 and m60. However, I found the two speakers to be significantly different when it comes to folk, jazz and pop where the vocals are prominent. With a stronger midrange, the m40 would be an amazing bargain - I would have chosen them over the m60's for sure, and never looked back.

On the one hand I don't want to criticize Axiom speakers because they're the best I've heard in their price range, but why must their smallest 3-way speaker be 47 lbs? A friend of mine has an old pair of Axiom towers from the late 80's (not sure of the model #). They're midway between the m22 and m40 in size, but they're true 3-way speakers. In all fairness, they colour the sound a lot more than the current Axioms, but they have a strong midrange, and sound great for speakers pushing 20 years old. Would it not be possible to accomplish something similar by adding a 5 1/4" driver to the m40? Or, what about adding a 6 1/2" driver to the m22, and stretching it a bit to make a tower, in the same way the m40 is essentially a stretched m3? Maybe I'm the only person who would buy them, but I see the lack of a smaller 3-way design as a gap in the Axiom line-up.

Again, at the risk of sounding hypercritical, I love my m60's, but I feel like I made a compromise in buying them. I am assuming there must be a flaw in my reasoning, because it seems that most modern tower speakers are BIG - either by necessity of design, or by consumer demand. Am I missing something here?

Well, I don't pretend to be real knowledgeable about this, bit I think the size of the cabinet has a direct effect on a speaker's performance (frequency response?). So, if you put the M60's drivers into an M40 cabinet, it wouldn't sound the same as an M60, or an M40. And, I assume that if it would sound better, Axiom would've done it that way. Hope I've got that correct.

Yup. Cabinet size and design is just as important as driver size and design to the overall sound and frequency response of a speaker.

krs, you can check out this thread on a similar idea that someone else queried about.

Thanks for the link, it was a useful discussion. If people think this diversion - and it is a real diversion - is annoying or too off-topic, please let me know and I'll end this thread...

I don't want to beat a dead horse too much, especially when I'm not an acoustics engineer. I guess the point I made about smaller towers comes from a more fundamental question, looking for the basic reasons why modern tower speakers seem to me to be taller and thinner (and heavier) on average than they were even 10 years ago. I guess I'm looking for some insight into how and why speaker cabinet design philosophy has changed over the last 20 years.

Looking at this within the Axiom line-up, it is interesting to compare the m2/m22/m60/m80 series. By most accounts they all have similar tonal balance in the midrange and higher frequencies, all using different cabinet sizes and driver combinations, though they all share the same "anti-standing wave" tapered cabinet design. Ignoring the issue of low-frequency output, the larger ones simply play louder than the smaller ones. This no doubt was accomplished by simultaneous manipulation of the interior cabinet design, driver configuration, crossover frequency, etc.

Is it then possible to scale down the m60 (or scale up the m22) to the size of the m40 or a bit smaller, and maintain a similar tonal balance? Put another way, by manipulating various things (internal cabinet geometry, driver configuration, crossovers), can you arrive at a similar tonal balance with an arbitrary cabinet size, or do only certain discrete sizes work?

A totally inappropriate analogy is the behaviour of electrons in an atom, where they can only occupy certain defined orbitals, and nothing in between...yeah, this really rambled off-topic.

>>looking for the basic reasons why modern tower speakers seem to me to be taller and thinner (and heavier)

A couple of things :

Back in the "paper cone and rubber surround" days, you needed a big driver to handle the low notes because only a big driver had the cone mass required for a low natural resonant frequency, ie the ability to plumb the low notes.

Now woofer cones are made from all kinds of exotic materials (heck, someone's probably gonna make them out of metal one day ) so the mass (and resonant frequency) is no longer connected to the driver size. Smaller drivers can still handle the deep bass as long as you have the surface area and the cabinet size... ie the only thing different is that 4 small woofers are now pretty much equivalent to one large woofer in terms of deep bass ability, which did not used to be the case.

So... you can now have little speakers but you still need big cabinets, right ? Why tall & skinny instead of short and boxy ? First, obviously, is that smaller drivers make this possible. A vertical array of drivers gives the best imaging, so there's a lot of empty space on both sides of the driver column with a traditional cabinet now. A tall skinny cabinet is going to be stiffer than a cube-ish cabinet because you have smaller unsupported area. Also, I don't know the details but diffraction effects off the edge of the cabinet also help a skinny cabinet to provide crisper imaging than a boxy cabinet.

So... you still need "big", you don't need "wide" any more, and "skinny" sounds better than "wide". If you take away the "wide" but still need the "big" you only have two choices -- taller and deeper.

Also, in my opinion, and a much less technical viewpoint, is that home theater set ups have taken over. Many new speakers are designed with decor in mind--having to fit next to the TV or entertainment center. The average family doesn't have the space or finances to dedicate to viewing room. Speakers must fit into overcrowded living spaces, and try to be unobtrusive. Especially with the subwoofer explosion to handle the lower frequencies, speakers are designed to work with subs and not as stand alones. WAF is often snickered at, but often is a very powerful force in determining what size, shape, and color is allowed in the decorating scheme of the living room. Whether we like it or not, small satellite systems and HTIBs are big sellers, and that's what will continue to be offered. We must keep up the good fight! Personally, I like looking at my big boxes that produce sound. I want to see what I spent my money on and not make it seem like the flowerpot on the mantle is the source of music.

I want my drivers to be made from transparent aluminum.


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