Paul, in my view there's no good reason to doubt what you read on the Axiom site about the M60 and M80 being very similar tonally. Alan Lofft has discussed this and pointed out that the additional mid and high drivers give greater power handling capacity for extremely high sound levels in extremely large rooms. This doesn't change the tonal quality at more reasonable levels. Be that as it may, if this is going to cause you to continually linger in anguished doubt in the future, then go with the M80s.
If your parenthetical comment reacting to my previous post and ending "...half their potential" was based on something I said, that certainly wasn't intended. Apparently no lab tests on your new 2600 have been published, but the recent
Hometheater lab results on the 2500 showed among other things 198 watts into 4 ohms with 0.1% THD and 242 watts at 1.0%. Keeping in mind that the M80s would be using about 1 watt at comfortably loud average listening levels and that even brief peaks might be unlikely to use more than about 100 watts, this would appear to provide for the full potential to be realized.
