Finally I got my receiver and held my breath to try out my first audio system with M60. The first song that I tried was "once upon a dream" by Linda eder in "jekyii & hyde". Unfortunately, the sound is not as good as I expected. I saw at some forum that people found a second life of their CD collection when they set up their new system. I do not feel the same way. especially when I used very low volume, I did not find any amazing improvement of the sound as compared to my JVC mini bookself steoro. My feeling is that the sound is flat at low volume.

I know there are a lot of happy M60 owners here. I am thinking I should have learned more from you guys. What I should do first is to figure out what is the weakest point of my system. Here are the components:

Speakers: Axiom M60 (a pair, only two channel)

Receiver: Denon AVR-2105 (7.1 A/V receiver, 90 watts per channel at 8 ohms, 20 Hz-20 kHz, <.08%THD), SRP $649, bought at $408 through Internet dealer

Soundsource: Denon DVD-1920 (univesal player, can play DVD, CD, SACD, Mp3, etc..Burr-Brown DSD-1608, 24 bit, 192 kHz Audio DACs with discrete decoding of PCM and DSD audio signals), SRP $349, bought at the same price

Audio interconnect: Acoustic Research RCA interconnect (from CD play to receiver), gold-plated, 3 ft, $24. (I am using the DAC circuit in the DVD-player instead of the receiver since I thought the Burr-Brown DAC is supposed to be better)

Speaker cable: Axiom, 9 ft for each channel, bare wire on speaker side, Axiom banana connector on receiver side.

Another major weak point may be my CDs and MP3's most of which do not have audiophile quality.

The only other system that I have audited is a pair of $700 paradiam speakers (cheaper than Axiom M60) with $3000 B&W seperate amps and a $300 NAD pure CD-player. At the time of audition, I thought the system was not good, expecially the speakers. But compared with my own system now, I am thinking that Paradiam system is even better. I tend to believe it is caused by the difference of amps. I am not sure if it is the AVR -2105 receiver to blame. One last major reason for all this may be that I have had such a high expectation on the audio system. With a $2000 system, maybe that is it.