Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Speaker advice needed for very "bright" rooms

I think the intent on making an 'average' room is to test their product in a setting outside of the physical measuring rooms like the NRC anechoic chamber. Certainly many people in a home will have a window or perhaps light carpeting in their living space so i don't think the choice of those items is far fetched.
Of course there is no real definition of what is in an average joe's living room, so as Alan had mentioned in his post, they used some industry standard as a template for how they built it.
Of course they could build maybe one or two other similar rooms with slightly different furnishings such as hard floors and walls with less coverings to possibly similate a more extreme, or more bare listening area that may occur in some houses, such as yours and mine.
However, i think the company can only go so far before the number of listening rooms they could potentially build would be out of control. That being said, it still comes down to this, if the Axiom speaker is too bright for your living room (or perhaps any highly reflective room) after you give it an audition, then yes, perhaps the Axiom speaker choice should be re-evaluated against some other brands.
It would be much easier to choose another speaker brand than to have to refurnish your room around your speakers.

If i have time i will try my M60s upstairs this weekend.

You may also want to check out these reviews in which some ppl have auditioned several Axiom models:

randymans post

fhw posts

Hello chesseroo and wschwartz,

Actually, the room at the NRC served as the prototype for the eventual room adopted as the standardized listening room by the IEC, so acoustical researchers around the world could perform measurements in a listening room that had standardized reverberation times and consistent dimensions.

The IEC room at the NRC measures 22 x 13.5 x 9.2 feet (6.7 x 4.1 x 2.8 m) and has a hard ceiling. The reverberation time is 0.34 seconds +/-0.08 s, from 250 Hz to 4 kHz, rising to 0.8 s at 40 Hz and falling to 0.2 s at 10 kHz. The point of the decor was to create a room "in which the disposition of sound scattering and absorbing furnishings" was "typically domestic."

Obviously, a loudspeaker intended for the domestic market should be auditioned in a "typical" living room. Of course there will be variations in decor in individual rooms that will have acoustic flaws that will strongly characterize their sound, even to the point where the room's flaws will dominate the sound of the speaker. And that's very likely to occur in the room you've been discussing.

It's absurd to suggest that a speaker designer try to provide different models that cater to the whims of interior design at the outside of the bell curve. If you want to live in a spartan room with highly reflective surfaces and little absorption, then you will have to accept the compromises in sound reproduction that result. Indeed, live instruments played in such a room can sound harsh and strident. It's why such attention is paid to the reflective and absorbent surfaces in various concert halls.

Regards,

Here is the web page for NRC's IEC-standard room, with a nice photo depicting a blind listening session.

http://ims-ism.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/asp/list_room_e.html

Thanks for the info, Alan!

Dear Alan,

I did not mean to suggest that speaker designers should create different models for the infinite "whims" of home furnishing and decor. My main concern was whether or not it makes sense to choose a less bright speaker for a relatively bright room—e.g., choosing the M40 over the M60. I'm still curious if you think that makes any sense.

I did pose the question of whether speaker designers could help match their creations to the real-world homes in which they will perform their duties—homes which will not always match the "typically domestic" specifications of a reference listening room. I submit that perhaps you are doing that already, at a very simple level, by offering resistors to change your speakers' characteristics to better match their owners' living spaces and preferences. I wonder if there will be more sophisticated ways to approach this problem in the future.

The nature of the "average" listening environment varies across cultures and history. I predict that the more "spartan" choices of mine and Chessaroo's will become more prevalent as awareness increases of indoor air quality problems associated with carpeting, heavy dust-collecting drapes, and the like. I don't think I am at an extreme of the bell curve in preferring hardwood floors and blinds. I would expect that as interior design choices evolve, so will loudspeaker design, and much else as well.

I do appreciate your point that taken to an extreme, hard-surfaced living environments may be virtually incompatible with enjoyable music—whether recorded or live. As I mentioned above, I was struck by the harsh, reverberant sound qualities of my own home when I emptied it for the floor refinishers; no speaker could sound pleasing in there!

I don't think my living space—filled with plants, books, soft furniture and animal beds, etc.—is incompatible with nice sound. If it is, I'm certainly not above hanging some curtains (though I doubt I'll ever match the absorbent qualities of your carpeted, drape-equipped reference room). At the moment, I'm just trying to figure out which Axiom speakers to buy.

Thanks for any thoughts.

Hi wschwartz,

I may have been a bit dismissive in my response; my apologies. Actually, the M22ti and M80ti are perhaps the most linear Axiom models--smooth and flat--in anechoic chamber measurements, through the upper bass, midrange, and upper octaves. As such, the reflective/absorptive character of a given room will "shape" their tonal character more than some other Axiom models.

It's a tough call as to what to recommend. My instinct is to always suggest the speaker with the smoothest and most linear frequency response, leaving the customer to make adjustments to his or her room. Equalization or even simple bass and treble controls are not a sonic cure-all for overly bright rooms. As a compromise, you might consider the M50ti's which have more midrange detail than the M40s, but they are not as linear as the 60s, 80s, or M22's.

Some years ago there were attempts by a consortium of several Canadian speaker companies (it was called the Athena Project) along with the NRC, to make the ultimate so-called "smart speaker"; active speakers with elaborate automatic digital EQ measurement and adjustment circuitry. The results were less than ideal, in part because the resulting equalization only worked for one precise listening location. As soon as you shifted position, the digital EQ no longer applied. (this is an oversimplification). You had to go through the whole procedure again. It was not commercially feasible, plus there has always been an historical reluctance on the part of consumers to buy active loudspeakers (except for subs), so these projects were abandoned, perhaps prematurely.

But, in your situation, the M50ti may be a reasonable compromise. I just finished a day of comparative A/B listening tests at the Axiom plant, using the M22ti, M60ti and M80ti as anchors for all the comparisons. During the M50 comparisons, I recall thinking, "the M50 would be ideal for someone worried about an overly bright room, but who still wants some midrange clarity. . ."

Regards,

So where's all the blind people?
You mean they are not actually blind-folded?

Dear Alan,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I love the idea of the active "smart" speaker that adjusts to the user rather than requiring the user adjust to it. But I can see that this is no easy task. Maybe one day someone will figure out how to make and market something along these lines that truly integrates the "forgotten component."

In the meantime, you will be happy to hear that I am taking to heart your suggestion to seek a better balance of soft and hard surfaces in the listening and living spaces. I've got too many animal companions with unpredictable bodily functions to go for rugs. But I have initiated inquiries about curtains with my quite shocked significant other. I'm not sure what else might help. Any suggestions are welcome. The forgotten component may turn out to be the most expensive one!

I've never much liked the current speakers in my living room, an old pair of Cambridge SoundWorks Ensemble II three-piece sub-sats, despite the rave reviews they received from Julian Hirsch and others when they appeared. I believe that whatever Axioms I choose will be much better, but I now wonder if some of my complaints (e.g., a sense of nerve-grating, tinny harshness), may indeed reflect the room more than the speakers.

I am planning to order a set of M3ti's, which will work well I think in my very small home office. I'll see how these sound in the larger room and based on the experience gained hopefully get a sense of whether more linear, and potentially brighter, Axioms would be feasible. The M50's are an intriguing suggestion.

The M3's, when permanently installed in the office, will have to be wall-mounted. Can you give us any sense of when the Axiom "Full Metal Bracket" might become available?

Thanks again.

wschwartz: How about some decorative rugs hung on the wall? I do not know much about your taste, but I believe there are a huge variety of designs available from classical Persian to art-deco to post-modern to abstract.

Alan: I do not know the details of the Athena Project, so I may be off the point. But I think the most logical stage to do room-equalization, if any, would be within the digital domain of the electronics, simply because that way you do not have to introduce additional A/D and D/A conversions. In that sense, I do understand the consumers' reluctance for "active" or "digital" loudspeakers. I can also readily imagine the enormous difficulty in obtaining a reasonable "compromise" among the significantly different EQ settings each optimized at different listening positions within the same room. But I would bet somebody will sooner or later come up with products incorporating this line of ideas, given the low cost and huge flexibility of processing signals in today's digital audio circuits...

Cheers!