Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Odyssey amp with m80s

Okey Okey...I had a heated day today at work and people were getting to me. Trying to escape from my task I logged on to see what new info I can gather in this particularly good message board. I apologize Semi for being an idiot and "squaked" like a duck and beligerently stooped to name calling. I think that anger was misplaced. I am sorry Semi.
As always you guys have given me great insight on this interesting world of audio & HT. I give my many thanks.
What I was trying to say earlier is that I personally without bias or coersion (I was able to take home a used Kimber cable for no cost but returning it another day) Based on replacing my old 7 year monster cable with a Kimber 4TC I noticed a difference. A slight difference not necessarily a good or bad one but a difference. I replaced the wires about 5 times. I got even my fiancee to tell me if she noticed a difference. Both of us noticed that the Monster was a little flat, somewhat more lower frequency available. The highs did not come out as prominent as in the Kimbers. How do you account for that audible difference?
Also the other time I was at a friends place I noticed he had bi-wirable cables but had it connected regularly to his speakers with the plates connected to the posts. Without him knowing I split up his wires to the highs and lows of his B&W and took out the joining plate. I played a CD he had in his player. He mentioned to me about 15 minutes into the music he noticed a bit more sounds he never heard before. A bit more clarity. He ask me if I fiddled around with his system. I was really there because I was fixing his setup. He had his fronts and center correctly in his A channel but by mistake put his surrounds on his B channel. So when playing music I was wondering why he was getting stereo full surround without engaging his predated 5.1 AC3 ready Denon.
With respect to finding scientific studies on copper wire. LEt me look around and see with what I can come up with supporting the theory of better cables with technology.

Hi Saturn et al,

I do not think anybody here doubts that you (and your fiance) genuinely perceived an audible difference. We are not debating about that "fact" (your perception), but about the possible reasons for that perception. Here are several hypotheses that I can immediately come up with:

(1) The Kimber cable was truly superior for some real physical/technological reasons.

(2) The electrical connection between the Monster cable and the binding posts on your speaker/amp was for some reason less than optimal, or the Monster cable was in fact defective in a subtle way.

(3) The actual physical sound produced by your speakers was in fact identical down to any measurable degree, yet you did perceive an audible difference due to a subtle change in the psycho-auditory processing in your own brain, that originates from the very knowledge that you have changed the cable.

Any one of these factors can cause a genuine change in your auditory perception. So the challenge is how to distinguish between these possibilities. I have to agree with Semi in that a repetitive blinded test is the only scientifically acceptable way to distinguish between (1)/(2) and (3). Roger Russell's essay I cited above describes in detail a nice example of how this blind test can be conducted.

As for the "benefits of bi-wiring" that your friend perceived (apparently not knowing what you did to his system), it could simply be that you happened to improve the electrical connection at the speaker terminals by loosening and retightening the binding posts and thus scratching and refreshing the contact surfaces. In fact, such exact scenario is also cited in Dr. Russell's essay. Again, the only definitive way to exclude that possibility is to conduct a repetitive blind test with your friend.

In my own professional field, the hypothesis (3) above is collectively called "placebo effects." A patient can genuinely feel that his/her condition is improved, just by taking a pill of starch that is labeled as an effective medicine for his condition. In order to exclude the placebo effects, all new drugs have to go through a rigorous process of randomized "double-blind" clinical trials before an FDA approval can be given.

Here, "double-blind" means that not only the patients who participate in the trial but also the physicians who evaluate the patients' conditions have to be blinded as to whether a given patient is taking the real drug or a placebo. This requirement is based on the well established fact that the knowledge (either in the patients or physicians) of being administered with a "potentially effective" drug alone exerts a genuine and significant effect on patients' evaluated conditions.

Honestly, I do not think the person is lying when he/she insists that he heard the difference. What is at stake is the possible mechanism(s) resulting in the perceived difference.

Cheers!

Great Post! I love to be abused by a guy who sounds like me when I was 15 years younger and knew _everything_ _for_sure_ (TM ;-)

Anyway, I heard people seriously dabbing in Audio professionally, semi- and amateurish being split 50%-50% whether bi-wiring buys you anything. I decided to give it a go, something to loose a night on ;-) I'm also a EE and I
_know_ based on my school-knowledge that it should not make a difference but I'm in real world for 20 years now and
I learned that the models taught in school leave many, many
effects out. And worst case, I'll use the 2nd pair later for bi-amping unless semi_on proves that that is garbage as well.

Same for cables, I assume it won't make a difference but why take the risk, it's maybe 5% of the total price of what I'm building and I wasted too many days saving on small stuff like that and then fixing it. Good quality stuff pays and who knows whether copper grain or the way the cables are twisted in the shield matters or not ;-)

Well, I'll let you guys know once I get all the stuff here. BTW, I'm right now starting to model my room with CARA. This is great voodo ;-)

And ehem, yes, it was a thread about odyssey + m80s ;-)

-- tony

so, here's first update, dual monoblock is sucking power since about 12 hours and I already turned off the heating in the room ;-)

Yes, amp handles speakers from start great and whatever I say has to be discounted that nothing's broken in yet. I'll post an update in 2-3 months when things settle.

1) Didn't biwire for several reasons (mostly, won't go into 4 amps later, just don't believe I'll get enough for the money involved). Got decent Groenberg cables though from Klaus.
2) Amp is handling the speakers great, vocals are amazing already now! My wife glued to Sade & Diana Krall playing over it and she's hearing that in decent quality every day already ;-)
3) Bass swims a tad and soundstage is rather flat and shifts but again, not broken in yet. Also, complex orchestration soundstage collapses (Dallas Wind, some good blues CDs)
4) Acoustic guitar is lacking on top as compared to some JBLs I heard (but that was with Millenium, an amp 5x price). I'm not sure it's the m80s or the amp. (Ry Coder)
5) I have a TacT 2.0 inbetween and it _significantly_ improves the sound already now. Vocals get very, very good and bass passable. Eva Cassidy is heart-breakingly well rendered.
6) I don't find the m80s bright at all. They seem right now to lack finesse on top a tad though (albeit maybe a matter of breaking in again)
7) Used CARA to position speakers (putting TacT in bypass to understand properties of speaker/amp first) and it made a big difference in terms of one can get out in terms of quality by placement. TacT is just a tad of an expensive solution for many I assume ;-)

more later, overall happy with the m80s, if I get the acoustic guitar sounding to the 'raise-hair-on-back-of-my-arm' level I remember hearing with the Millenium/TacT/JBLs I will be a _really_ happy guy.

--- tony

So, here is the report after driving the m80s for about a month every day 8-10 hours
(they're in my home office, about 400 sqft or so with sloped ceiling) to get them settled
in. I won't open the can of worms about whether components 'break-in' or your ears
break in or not but I can say that there is quite a dramatic difference in the sound
to my ears after a month.

first the setup: NAD 541i (and tuner & other sources not as good) pre-amped with a
TacT 2.0 going into odyssey stratos monoblocks into m80s. All wiring groenberg (again,
maybe there is no difference to lamp cord but the cost compared to total makes it
irrelevant, I'm going for puresilver interconnects from source to preamp just to
check I don't miss a cheap improvement). Started driving via digital 44.1 interface
and ended up going 96kHz oversampled analog which sounds significantly better
(I'm sure someone here will claim oversampling is a non-issue either). Digital
sounds more precise & lower noise level but much thinner in the middle and highs
(I assume it's the harmonics missing), maybe due to clock jitter? Shows on female vocals.
Syncing the clocks on TacT and maybe Tascam CD player is one of next projects.
Started sitting fairly close (6 feet or so) and moved back to 12feet. These speakers
need a lot of room to sound great. I prefer listening on-axis, I found with
measurements that off-axis the speakers seems to loose flat response fairly
fast (maybe it's my room response though).

Soundstage: Width is very, very good, going on good recording beyond speaker outer
edges easily. Most amazing stuff was actually the clock on the 'kid from cleveland
in the comfort of routine' waters' 'Amused to Death' (recorded Q-sound) that
clocks on the left of me, basically to the left of my head, about 8-9 feet in
front of the speakers! On 'kind of blue'
the alt and tenor sax are 3-4 feet outside the outer edge of the speakers and I can
localize Miles' trumpet head moving when playing.
Depth is ok, the
speakers went from very front to little recessed presentation, depth is however
only 9=12 feet deep I would say. Odyssey seems to be said to be flater in depth so maybe
that's it.
so, in sum, I heard better (but on amp ~10k$). Instrument placement is much better than
at the beginning, pretty good overall I would say.
With lots of power behind them, very loud and complex passages go through
without any congestion (Epiphanies, Number 11 as example). No matter how much
bass and violins romp on the stage.

Bass: I am lost how people can make such strong statements about bass quality
unless they have very, very good listening rooms with no room modes. I did CAD
(Cara) modelling to place my speakers, still the peaks and dips below 300Hz are
unbelievable. And my room doesn't echo much, has sloped celing and is very
non-rectangular. Correcting using TacT makes the bass a completely different game!
Dimensions taughter so a kick drum can be easily told from drum/contrabass/bass guitar,
even when very loud.
Anyway, when corrected, the bass is very good and deep for a floor-stand. I measure
the speaker keeping up decently down to 20Hz and then still trying down to 10Hz.
What helped was a lot of solid state amp power, of a smaller NAD 50 or 70W amp it
sounded ok but no way as open as now. It's probaly some of the best bass I heard without subs.

Middle: very, very good but I think it's primarily the amp. Stratos seems to
be very good here as well. Female vocals/sax are outstanding.
There is one gripe I think I attribute to the m80s. There is in upper mids a
'hole' in localization where instruments seem to shift or loose localization.
I assume that the dome tweeter and mid drivers are phase-reversed (dome vs.
cone) and that flips/kills localization for the crossover frequencies (seems
we humans are doing localization via phase of mid/higher frequencies?). As well, either
my amp or Axioms do not like that much very sharply plucked instruments with
lots of harmonics (acoustic guitar). It is very good still but the 'raise-my-hair'
magic I heard on AR with 10K$ amp is not here. That's irregardless of running through
the TacT DAC, the CD's DAC and TacT ADC. Maybe the CD player has a weak spot here,
don't know.

Top: Yes, it is bright in the sense that it's almost flat, rather than rolling 3/6dB
off like lots of speakers/gear does. I verified the very flat response using measurements on
the TacT. So, the speaker is great, most recordings are however not standing
up to that much scrunity. I listen now with a 3db rollover from 300 to around
10k and then about 6db rollover to 20kHz. Only few recordings sound good
flat. The tweeter is very, very sensitive, listening over 80dB peak I hear any noise/
quantization of the CD or whatever it is on most CDs unless it's few good HDCD recording
(yes, also when driving digital toslink or 75Ohm). And on most classicals you hear page-turning,
piano player breathing, on jazz you hear the guy getting his lips on the trumpet.
Not necessarily what many people may care for.
So beware, if your recordings are not that great, Axiom will be punishing you
unless you can like me play with the target curve on a TacT to dumb things down.
Also, I think that when played very loud (>85dB peaks) the speakers starts to
emphasize the mids and highs (storing energy? enclosure vibrations?).
I can't objectively measure it but on recordings with problematic presence
region the sibilants become worse when played very loud. I can equalize the problem
away (TacT has very neat digital software equalizer) and think I will dump couple of
ten pounds of lead shot on the speaker top.

Summary: m80 and odyssey monoblocks (which I don't review here but can only highly
recommend) are a complete
_steal_ for the money and from my hearing comparisons come up with a sound close
to 20k$+ setups I listened to. With a TacT thrown in, there were few things that sounded
better I heard and all of them had hair-raising price tags on them. If you have
patience and money for esotherics like 4 speaker setups,
electrostats, ribbons, tubes and LAMM monoblocks, you can get
quite a better sound in certain areas but with no-maintainance floor-standing cones
& A A/B solid-state
the setup seems to cover way over 80% of what's possible.

BUT

i) it's a very
revealing setup, if your sound material is not that great, be sure you listen to
it first, you may realize that you don't like it anymore (I scrapped about 50% of
my most preferred CDs, they're unlistable on this setup that mercilessly reveals
faults [things like no soundstage, crappy vocals, very 'hot' mixes, too much
'playing' with soundstage]). Most 'studio' recordings in the 'pop/rock' departement
went the way of the doodoo.

ii) you need lots of room, I would say closer than 10 feet don't listen to m80s.

iii) with a lot of amp-power m80s sound much more 'airy', especially bass improves.

disclosure: no affiliation with any of the products mentioned except as happy
customer.

prz,
An interesting review, primarily your summary after the "BUT' part.

A couple of things offhand:
1) More power often equates to louder volumes which listeners perceive as 'better sounding'.
2) i would never equate more expensive to better sounding, that is quite presumptious, a 10k amp will not automatically sound better than a $500 amp
3) clock jitter was explained by Alan in this old post, you might want to take a read of his explanation
4) How were you measuring the M80 down to 10Hz?

Seems that your TacT will take care of most of the issues you felt were issues with the M80s.
Enjoy the sound!

In reply to:

---

And on most classicals you hear page-turning, piano player breathing, on jazz you hear the guy getting his lips on the trumpet. Not necessarily what many people may care for.

---

You piqued my curiosity there. Are you suggesting that music may sound better (say, for many people) if those "noises" are less audible? If so, I strongly disagree, and propose that without the performing noise, the music would sound instantly "dead" and detached. The breaths of the keyboard or string player, the "hiss" of woodwinds (especially flute) and brasses, and even foot thumps of the conductor... Those are, im my opinion, fairly important "sound component" of the acoustic genres of music. If you go to a violin recital, you will clearly and constantly hear a fairly loud "phrasing breaths" of the violinist, which carry the power to connect and engage the audience to the performer.

An OK audio equipemnt reproduces the sound of instruments very nicely; a great audio set will reproduce the "performance" by the human being.

1) sure, I listened level-matched (TacT preamp has one big frigging number showing you the dB peak level ;-) and my comment holds for bass at high volumes, at low volumes less power did ok, from about 70+ on, bass started to fall off with less amp power.
2) agreed (but the 10k$ amp was better though, especially on guitar ;-)
3) will do
4) TacT seems to measure that low, at least when you look at graphs (it has an individually calibrated microphone and software with each unit, since it's pricey gear, not surprising ;-)

yes, I'm happy very much with the m80s after tactifying my music, but I assume for most people a TacT or even couple of good quality eqs are expensive (read the equalizer thread, very interesting) so they may have issues.

Hmm, sushi, not suggesting anything here. I think it's all personal preferences.

As example, I listen to some pretty old jazz and lots of live recordings and boy, those have sometimes lots of noise at the bottom (over 70dB almost everything recorded before late 80's has a distince noise bottom) but nevertheless I love lots of those dearly compared to many clinically black-canvas engineered HDCD. I can abstract the noise away and the performance carries me but then again, when I try to play it to any non-high-end-audio-tinted friends here, they immediately say 'oh, it's noisy, I don't like that' so my reading is, most people cannot deal with it well.

With classics, I admit personally to prefer not be bothered with people noises. My non-high-end-audio-tinted friends as well often think it's 'intimidating' to hear the performance so clear and so close to you. One guy that is in New York's concert halls a lot let me pick a target curve that rolls of from 4k to 20k over 10dB! when listening to 'rites of spring' he heard recently. and then said "oh yes, it's like the real thing now". He sits always way, way back and that's how he likes it! For me like I said, people noises are something I do not look for, though there is one exception where I want every finger on the fret, every breath and every tap, namely live blues, one of the great recordings is the 'Hard again' by Muddy Waters, there is a whole room of old guys with you there saying 'yeah, man ...', 'that's it ...', 'you go it ...' and slurring their feet when Muddy hits it. Unbelievably engaging ;-)

So, everyone to its liking, I just wanted to emphasize that a odyssey/m80 combination is not a laid-back-polite-english gear like mission, this stuff etches the material on you whether you like it or not.

Read the jitter comments by Alan. It's in his usual style [slight irony on] 'get a couple pieces of lamp cord, your mom's portable player and two empty cans and you built the equivalent of a 100k$ setup, oops, not cans, axioms' [/slight irony off]. That all maybe true scientifically, but why did I hear a discernible difference when running my gear of a 541i vs. a Audiotron over toslink. Both put out a digital stream. And why is the 541s analog oversampled output discernibly better than the digital (which surprised me a lot)? DAC, clock jitter? Shouldn't be either according to Alan. The best explanation I have is right now digital 'clock jitter' so maybe I'll try to follow it up. It can and has been measured that there is jitter on S/PDIF [clock is recovered from signal] influenced by material played. And of course, my digital preamp is having another unsynchronized digital clock taking that in. So the wave form, when restored at wrong time, may get warped significantly enough to matter? Why not clock sync the CD player and the preamp, can't be bad, except some money wasted ;-)

finally, I agree completely with Alan that room response and speakers response is _dimensions_ more important than the 'jitter' kind of stuff. I am still flabbergasted how people talk about 'more controlled bass' when changing amps in a room. Without room correction, bass is all over the place unless you have a room calculated and built just for listening and without room modes. Bass peaks of 5dB are already very good and on average setups I see +/-30dB!
But once you corrected for it, it may be that the smaller differences start to become more discernible. don't know, I'm searching here ...

BTW, I have a Ph.D. in software and my dad is a E.E. so I have a strong technical/scientific background and not musical. I always prefer science over rumors but I learned that most science is built on models or controlled experiments that only mirror reality to a certain degree and then either the model has to be improved or you get a guy with a lot experience and serious gut-feeling ;-)