In reply to:
The thing is, my CD player has a pretty high output; so high that my M3s are loud at 10% volume on my amp. Maybe the gain is too high in the preamp input. So by about 60% volume itself the peak is reached and beyond this the distortion starts.
Yes, that is exactly the symptom of power amp clipping. On the other hand, with M3's rated maximum power input of 175W (Axiom actually tests the speaker with continuous rated input), I do not think the M3 start to show stress with a clean (non-clipping) 50W input. Your bottleneck is with the amp, I believe.
