I was kicking around the Epinions.com site and read an awful and absurd review of my personal favorite Axiom speakers, the M3Tis. I wrote a review under my humble name de guerre, "Electrodolt," because they don't accept names which start with a numeral such as the 2x6spds. Anyway, those of you who have experience with M3s might want to put in your own 2 Cents. I did.

I will guess it was done by one of the semi-regular AVS guys, Monte, that seems to have a hate on for the M3 due to it's lack of a 'true' crossover and also has bashed the rest of the Axiom lineup without ever hearing any other Axiom speaker last I remember anything from him.

I have read that before. It is a pretty long review. The M3's are still a nice sounding speaker for the price though.

Has there been ever an explanation on why Ian decided to go this route with the design of the M3 and M50 and to what benefits it had over any other design versions during R&D?

I don't think anyone could read that review seriously without concluding there is an agenda behind it.

Yeah, that "review" was mentioned here before and I read it a couple years ago. I was especially amused by the paragraph that began "I hate having to write this negative review about Axiom...". A bigger lie there never was!

Among other points where his claims conflict with listening reports and lab measurements done by others, his report of distortion in the upper harmonics of the mid-woofer(due to the lack of a crossover, of course)is contrary to the NRC measurements in the SoundStage review, where the 2-5KHz distortion was almost immeasurably low(for a speaker), on the order of 0.5%.

Weeeeellll.... the NRC, being a bunch of Canadians, is obviously lying.

Dr. House, the Axiom M3s, like the wonderful and hugely more expensive Reference 3ade capo i speakers, does not use a crossover for the woofer and only a part or two for the tweeter's crossover. The less that lies in the signal path the better. The M3 is designed to use the mechanical frequency roll off characteristics of the woofer to integrate it with the tweeter instead of an electronic cross-over. Simple is beautiful. I think it is this lack of a woofer cross-over which makes the M3 so special.

Don't think less of the M3 just because it has no electronics between the signal and the woofer.