Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler How do you measure speaker brightness?

Check out what this guy wrote at avsforum.com about the m60s:

"I've heard these and found them to be almost unlistenable after 5 or 10 minutes due to the brightness of the tweeter/upper mids. The bass was very peaky sounding and didn't reproduce any of the bass instruments well at all. I would say there are quite a few speakers in the under $1000/pr range that are better overall unless you simply prefer a very bright sound. I have heard worse, but I don't think these are anywhere near what they are cracked up to be."

Then I wrote:

"According to this article, they are not as bright as you would like people to believe:

hometheaterhifi.com/volume_11_1/axiom-m60ti-speakers-3-2004.html

Also, take a look at this freq response chart for the m22ti:

soundstagemagazine.com/measurements/axiom_m22ti_se/

Looks pretty flat to me. Perhaps it was the equipment or the source that you were using that caused you to think the speakers were so bright."

His reply was:

"I think it was my ears that I was using that caused me to think the speakers were so bright.

Of course, FR graphs don't indicate distortion levels, so they might be accurate, just harsh.

In any case, with a dipole speaker, the treble won't be aimed directly at you so it probably won't matter nearly as much. But I'll chime out since I'm not that knowledgeable about who makes better or worse dipole speakers."

This seems like a pretty lame, half-assed answer, don't you think? If a speaker were bright, wouldn't it show up as an increase in the treble region of the frequency response graph?

Actually, the "hump" in the 4khz area is right about where our ears are most sensitive to treble.

This may or may not be the reason that some think of the speaker as being "bright". But that is the M22....not the M60.

Hmm, but from 100hz to 20khz, it's +/-2.5db. Is 2.5db really that noticeable?

It looks to me to be more than that, but yes, 2.5dB can be noticeable, especially where the ear is the most sensitive. Play any test tone...take out your ratshack meter...raise and lower it....you can hear the difference.

But like always...it may sound good to one person, and bad to another.

It just seems there is a lot of Axiom bashing coming out in reviews as of late. Just seems to be the flavour of the month, it you can't beat them, beat them up... and be vague about it.

Bren R.

Well, the reviews are good. Look at the new one from hometheaterhifi and that one from audioholics. It's people who own other speakers that seem to be doing the whining. They seem to think that all the pro-reviewers are in some sort of conspiracy to fool people into buying Axioms, LOL!

subjective

don't be offended if someone doesn't like them.

i had paradigm monitor 7s minis and cc370. sold them on ebay. tried rockets and i personally thought that they were junk. some people love them. so i went back to my canadian made preference and tried axiom. i'm very happy with these.