Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo ISO Looking for an Axiom DSP1 for LFR1100's

Rich is rrlev. Look at his signature on the first post of this thread.

Nope. Sorry. They are NOT M100s!

Aha! I'm just getting used to this forum. Mojo, please enlighten me. What is the physical difference of these speakers besides the 1100 having rear drivers? Is there a separate enclosure for the 1100's rear drivers ? I have the passive 1100's which I presume has a hi pass filter from 180Hz up?

Physically, the 1100 looks the same as the M100 with three exceptions: the rear drivers, extra set of terminals, and the angled rear baffle. I don't remember if the vortex port count and location is the same.

The interior bracing may be different and the amount of sound dampening. My active 1100 includes more bracing and is stuffed to the gills compared to the M100v4.

The 1100 has two internal cross-overs: one for the front driver array and another for the rear. The M100 has a single cross-over.

The 1100 also has the DSP. The DSP steers a set of frequency bands to the front cross-over and a set to the rear. The DSP is the secret sauce that makes the LFR an LFR.

Now you might ask, so what? If the 1100 has twin cross-overs, and I decide to only use the front driver array, it will sound like an M100, right? Not so fast! The cross-over for the 1100 front driver array is not the same as the cross-over for the M100. Recall that the DSP steers frequencies to the front driver array and those frequencies are different than the full audio spectrum delivered into the M100. Hence, the front array cross-over is of a different design compared to the cross-over of the M100.

Without the DSP, not only do you not have an LFR, you don't even have an M100.

You could consider buying the M100 cross-over and doing surgery to convert the 1100 to an M100. But it may be a franken-100 because of the bracing, stuffing, different vortex port configuration and rear driver array. Every change affects the sound!

Think he’s talking about different pair of speakers…
I just saw the posts that got in before this I got this one in.

Think Debbie (a knowledgeable Axiom employee) once told me that she had a pair of LFRs she used that way.
So, I bet using only the fronts will work fine but Mojo might be right in that she might have been doing it through the DSP.

Rodney is asking what the difference is between LFR and M100 and why he can't make a DSP-less LFR sound like an M100.

My answer fully resolves his question in plain, grammatically-correct English like I learned from Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Mmmmmk?

Debbie is not as discriminating as us. She shouldn't have anything more than M2 in her room.

Ok, I edited my post above because (I hate to admit it) you’re probably right.
I’d call axiom …
It’s a bit of a pain these day since all the key people seem to be tied up in the Bryston integration

Mojo. why would the LFR passive have a different crossover than the M100 on the front? it wouldn't make any sense as why would the be doing any sound alteration inside a crossover when it is far more possible to do any sound changes inside the DSP.

From what I understood, it's not that they are cutting out some parts of the sound and frequencies from the front and sending that sound out to the back. More that they are reproducing some of the sounds / frequencies that the front part of the speaker is making, and sending them out the back speakers with a very specific "secret sauce" alteration to timing so that the sound from the back gives a perfectly timed echo to what was made out the front giving you size and depth. I remember the Mirage Omni speakers but as they didn't have any of the electronics and DSP that the LFR have, it did give a more open sound, but was difficult as it really depended on the placement inside a room and the rooms dynamics.

Perhaps you can enlighten us in your engineering analysis of the crossover differences between the M100 and the LFR1100 so that we can all be better educated by your knowledge.

I’lll put in my thought on that …. Having the DSP altering the signal to the front would allow them to fine tune the curves better. They could do that by just modifying the signal going to a M100 crossover or modify the crossover (most probable reason would be to get better efficiency) and let the DSP the main lifting. In my mind it, with out more data, we just don’t know.

The other question is what is the DSP doing to the front signal to make it OMNI-Directional? If only linearizes the curves to a M100 crossover and doesn’t modify anything for the OMNI part then driving the front LFR without it is fine.

Hmmm...I looked at the cross-over service parts on the Axiom site. I see only a single LFR cross-over and I assume this must be for the rear driver array. This implies the same cross-over is used for the rear driver array of the LFR660/880/1100. It also implies the cross-over for the front driver array is the same as the M60/80/100 (three different ones).

Rodney, I think you can use it as an M100 without the DSP.