Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo FM Radio

I have read a lot about Axiom speakers being "revealing" and as such, highlighting poor source material. I was wondering if it is worthwhile to have good speakers in a system that would be used for 40% movies, 30% cd's, and the remaining 30% FM radio? Would they make radio sound like crap?

Not that I've noticed. It seems a lot more full when I'm listening on the Axioms, but it's not any worse than listening to the radio on crapass systems.

i think that would depend on the song, or what kind of music you were listening to, and if the signal was strong.

i am no expert, but i would guess that FM radio would sound OK.. it does on my speakers thru my receiver..

bigjohn

Hi Nacho123,

FM radio actually is genuine high fidelity. With a frequency response of 30 Hz to 15,000 Hz, plus or minus a few dB, and a signal-to-noise ratio of greather than 65 dB in stereo and 75 dB in mono (given a reasonably strong signal), it doesn't meet CD standards but it's good enough to reveal the virtues of really good (or lousy) recordings. And the transparency of Axiom speakers will certainly expose the best and the worst, even telling you a lot about the cleanness of a particular FM transmitter's signal quality.

Many FM stations, especially rock and pop music outlets, use a lot of compression (the dynamic range of a typical rock FM station is about 3 dB at best) in order to give their signal more "reach" or coverage, and more "punch" on the dial, but apart from that, FM radio is a high-quality medium, except in moving cars, among dense high rise buildings, and in hilly country where it may be plagued by mutli-path distortion.

Regards,

High quality speakers will make any "source" sound as good as possible, (relatively speaking).....but.....they cannot "create" clarity, etc. that is not there.
So it is just an audio "illusion" that poor source material sounds "worse" on "good" speakers.

Might want to check whether or not you can get cable FM where you are.

Shaw here offers it - just plug a cable feed into the 75ohm coax "FM antenna" F-plug on the receiver, then try to find the stations - 97.5 air is 103.5 cable here, for instance.

Think it's mostly a Canadian thing - we have the space on the band to add 2 of every station - from what I hear, American radio doesn't.

Bren R.

Thanks to those that responded. You have alleviated one of the worries I had about upgrading to Axiom speakers.
I have searched this and other forums and never seen the question asked. I guess nobody listens to radio anymore.

In reply to:

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FM radio actually is genuine high fidelity

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What about satellite music channels from Dishnetwork? Dish says that they are CD quality but every time I listen to these satellite music channels(stereo ones), something just doesn't sound right compared to CD. Its hard to pinpoint but it just seems that the soundstage lacks depth and dimension and becomes a flat wall of sound lacking spacial quality. Could this just be my imagination?

Actually, it's "Klaatu barada nikto."
Internet Movie Database

I like Ash's pronunciation better from the Army of Darkness screenplay.

Sitting here listening to the radio (NPR, so it's mostly talk, but some music), and it sounds great on the M50s. No worries!

mwc,

I don't get Dish Network although my Time-Warner overpriced "package" does include 30 or so digital music channels.

All these digital services (including Sirius and XM Satellite Radio) use some form of audio "codec", a perceptual encoder/decoder that throws away a lot of data, so how it sounds depends on the codec and what data rate or the degree of data compression that's used. I know Dolby has a professional codec that is quite transparent, used to link studios in different parts of the country.

The Time-Warner channels I get sound very clean, although my listening is entirely subjective. However, I did serve on the listening panel for international tests (the ones in Canada were done by the Dept of Communications in Ottawa) of audio codecs that were tested for "transparency" for use in broadcasting and signal distribution with satellite links.

The best ones were amazingly good and ran at 320 kb/second (Dolby, I think, and one chosen for Europe called Musicam). Those were essentially transparent. The signals that caused real problems for some of the codecs that were rejected were castinets and solo female vocal a cappella (a Suzanne Vega song that I never want to hear again. . .the tests lasted several days so I heard it endlessly repeated).

Regards,

Yeah, that happens with Suzanne Vega songs.