I recently read a review for the M80's that concerned
me (too good for bad recordings) and it got me re-thinking of using the same 5 speakers for the mains in my current 7.2 and future 11.2 set up.
The most obvious down sides are the center speaker height and not being able to free up floor space taken up by rear speaker stands.
Hopefully someone here is willing to comment on a similar layout.

notified

Mark, notified of/for what? Was there a spammer message here and it is now gone? I've seen that you "notified" in another of brwsaw's posts. Just wondering.

Yes, a spammer had posted three times this morning. It looks like the posts have been removed now.

Maybe I shouldn't put the "notified" posts up, but I figure it might save 10 other people from having to notify as well(?).

If you hit notify on an already notified post, you get told pretty quickly that someone beat you to it. So yeah, I don't think you need to make the post.

Maybe we should notify about Mark's notified posts?

Notify about the notified? Not if I have any say today, K?

Hey, it all helps to get post counts up, right? Mark is getting closer to 10,000 posts you know.

Me, I have been around here for 11 more days than him, but only have a fraction of his post count.

Yeah, but you've built an HT.

Me? I haven't set my distances yet since buying the VP160 a loooong time ago.

Edit: And Chris, I didn't realize that. I'm usually one of the earlier people online in the morning, so it seems I usually come across those SPAMs first. (Even though this morning I slept in).

The system does prevent more than one person from notifying, incidentally.

But the system is down.

I liked the siren. It was like ...

JP, we can't hear you through the computer.

You guys are silly.

Damn! That means we can't all notify Mark's notify posts. I feel like I'm in an episode of Pinky and the Brain.

For the OP,

Try sending a PM to onn on this site, he has 5 M80s in his system.

Thanks. I've decided the M80 is the right speaker.
There no doubt in my mind I will have an actual HT twice the size of my current one in my next home.
I've also decided to use my extra channels to bi-amp them. I will be giving up all but 5.1 but for my current needs this makes the most sense.

There's really no benefit in using the bi-amping provided by receivers these days. In fact, there's probably no benefit from bi-amping unless you were to remove the crossovers in the speakers and purchase an active external crossover as well as separate amps.

Thats bitter sweet news.
I had read "the more power you give them the better they sound".
I would get to keep either front pressence or rear surrounds...

I would actually keep both but currenty I only can run either the front or rears at one time. I should have bought a model up last year but...

It wouldn't actually be more power, unfortunately--for one thing, it's all coming from the same power supply, and for another, even with separate amps, the power doesn't sum (tweeters and mids take much less power than woofers, so they'd consequentially be using a smaller percentage at any given volume level.)

The jury is out on "the more power the better" thing. Or, I should say, there is intense disagreement on it. But I don't think you'll get a lot of disagreement that biamping internal to the receiver doesn't give you more power.

Before I started looking around at recievers I figured it was all pretty simple.
1) Don't buy cheap if you want good sound
2) Don't underpower your speakers
3) Tweak
4) Upgrade
5) Repeat

You can overdo it 3. You can definitely overdo it on 4. Try to keep the number of times you do 5 to a minimum.

BRW, you appear to have picked up some misinformation in your reading elsewhere. Specifically on the two main points you mention here, a receiver can't be used to "bi-amp" a speaker and you can't simply "give" a speaker more power.

Bi-amping by definition requires two amplifiers; a receiver has only one amplifier with several output channels. The output transistors in each channel just act as valves to distribute the required amount of voltage needed in each channel at some instant in time from the receiver's power supply section. The individual channels have no power of their own, it all comes from the limited supply available in the main central power supply. Distributing this to a speaker through two channels rather than one can't increase the power available by any amount.

As to "giving" a speaker more power, that only takes place when it's played louder. At a given loudness level a speaker uses only the amount of power for which it's designed, regardless of the amplifier. At a comfortably loud level speakers of typical sensitivity, such as the Axioms, use about 1 watt. Brief peaks can take much more, of course, but unlikely anything beyond the 100 watts or so typical receivers can easily support. Adding an amplifier with a maximum capacity of 200 or 2000 watts doesn't accomplish anything. Unused headroom is simply that: unused.

Wishful thinking indeed.
Always good news though.I'll keep reading, maybe I'll understand it a bit better by the time my color samples arrive.

All of those amplifiers share the same power supply.

Fair enough.