Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners M3 first thoughts

Connected the M3s that arrived today, leaving the 15-year-old American Acoustics bookshelfs on the floor in the family room.

OMG!! Started out with Alison Krause on CD. There was fiddle under the dobro never heard before. Could hear the vibration of the guitar strings, the stroke of the pick along the upper (wound) guitar strings and (finally) differentiate the voices in their ultratight harmonies!

Accurate!

The acoustic bass was quite clean. (No subwoofer planned, these are "B" room speakers.) On the old "B" speakers, I had to pump up the equalizer bass on my receiver to get much bass at all; equalizer is turned off/flat on the Axioms.

Went back to work and told my co-worker I might as well pile up all my other speakers in a wheelbarrow and roll them out to the Dumpster in the alley.

Still don't think my wife will condone the FM brackets though

Oh. Guess I don't really have a question, yet

In reply to:

---

The acoustic bass was quite clean. (No subwoofer planned, these are "B" room speakers.) On the old "B" speakers, I had to pump up the equalizer bass on my receiver to get much bass at all; equalizer is turned off/flat on the Axioms.

---

The 6.5" woofer on the M3s is probably your best bet for a "dot zero" (shaddup, you "point"ers! ) system. Glad to hear you're so impressed, and welcome aboard!

Bren R.

the reason you don't need to EQ it for more bass is because there is already a bump in the bass region of the M3.

A full set of measurements can be found here:
http://www.soundstagemagazine.com/measurements/axiom%5Fm3ti/

Definitely helps without a sub.

*ahem* A 2dB "bump".

Bren R.

Maybe someday I'll figure out what all that means ....

I see more than 2dB...I think.

Come to think of it, without knowing the response of his old speakers, my point is moot.

In reply to:

---

I see more than 2dB...I think.

---

Looks like about 2dB to me on the average. There's a slight depression above that that makes it look worse.

Of course, if I didn't own the speakers, I'd be claiming it was 5dB.

Bren R.

In reply to:

---

Maybe someday I'll figure out what all that means

---

It's really easy, Marc.

Look across the bottom (X-scale) of the graph... that's frequency.. lower notes to the left, higher to the right (not being insulting, trying to be very clear). Reading up the Y-axis of the chart, ignoring all the technical jargon about what the test signal was, that's SPL - sound pressure level - the higher, the louder.

The top line is "on-axis" (ie: in the sweet spot), the other two are further and further off axis... say, like where you'd make the wife and kids sit... 15 and 30 degrees out of the sweet spot. They don't measure the "mother in law" axis, which is out in the garage tied to the car bumper.

So the perfect (but impossible) speaker would be three flat lines. At every frequency, it would reproduce the exact same "loudness". When you see a valley or peak, that shows the speaker will be unnaturally "depressed" or "forward" in those ranges. How much is too much? 6dB is considered what humans hear as twice as loud. So you can gauge by that.

Sensitivity is a measure of how loud the speaker will play at a given power level. The tube amp guys are usually pushing small watts and look for sensitive speakers to get the most volume out of them.

Those are the top two graphs (Chart 1)

---

Chart 2: Listening window... simply the above test averaged out between on-axis, and 15 degrees off axis high, low, left and right. Straight line here is better.

----

Chart 3: THD+N - top line is frequency response - see above, bottom line is Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise... the higher the spikes are, the more noise is inherent at each frequency. If you care exactly what THD is, I can explain later. For now, noise is bad - lower the line the better.
---
Chart 4: Impedance Magnitude Variation and Electrical Phase
IMV (way oversimplified) is the amount of resistance to the DC signal at each frequency. A flat line here is perfect (and impossible)

Phase shows how far out of, well, phase, I don't know how else to describe it, the speaker naturally falls at each frequency. If a speaker was 180 degrees out of phase, it would be "pushing" - driver excursion outward - when it was supposed to be "pulling" - driver excursion inward. Best here is a flat line at 0 degrees.

A bit oversimplified, but unless you're flying tonnes of equipment in a concert hall, chances are this is in depth enough.

Bren R.

Yeah, uhh, they don't even have a model number on them. All I know is when I wandered into an audio shop a couple of weeks ago to see their Paradigms, he asked if I'd ever seen the inside of the American Acoustics bookshelf: "the woofer looks like a Tupperware bowl"!

Of course I wouldn't know, The grilles don't come off on mine ...

Here's a question though -- *if* there's a such thing as "break-in" ... saw some dispute in one thread should I break these in at medium volume .. high ... low? Or doesn't it matter?

>>Here's a question though -- *if* there's a such thing as "break-in" ... saw some dispute in one thread should I break these in at medium volume .. high ... low? Or doesn't it matter?

Don't think it matters. It's not like breaking in an engine where if you run a constant speed you get funny vibration patterns and the rings don't wear in properly. Most of the people here don't believe in break-in anyways -- most agree that the sound improves after a couple of days but general feeling is that your ears are adapting more than the speakers are improving.

I believe in break-in myself but that is a minority view. Medium volume for a couple of days is fine if you believe in that kind of thing -- otherwise just listen to them when you have time and you will probably find you like them even more after a few days.

Glad to hear your first impressions were really good. They are really nice speakers. Where do you have them positioned right now -- M3s on the stands, stands on the ledge ?