Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Speaker stands for M22's?

I bought M60s because I wanted to listen to all kinds of music without a sub. After a couple of years I am getting a better understanding of why I didn't like the sub.

Over the last 30 years I became used to the sound of "good speaker w/o sub", ie decent bass but not flat to the very lowest frequencies. As a result, when I listened to any modern music *with* a subwoofer there seemed to be much more deep bass than I expected or wanted, although in hindsight some of this was probably because the "mains only" systems (including M60s) were not flat to 20 Hz and therefore were not accurately reproducing the the relative SPL of the lowest notes.

The complicating factor is that quite a few recordings seem to be mixed to sound good on "typical" equipment, which often includes pumping up the bass a bit to compensate for the rolloff of a typical playback system. When you play that music on a very flat system with subwoofer, you are really getting too much bass as a result.

I think this is why I keep coming back to M60s without a sub for music playback. I believe the reason I still liked M2s with sub is that at the quieter playback levels you can get with those speakers the extra bass is not so objectionable, in fact to some extent it is probably providing a bit of "loudness compensation". The same would apply to M22s but to a lesser extent, since the M22s can play at higher SPLs than the M2s.

Before I purchased a good AV receiver, I was only using the crossover in the sub, which resulted in a non-symmetric crossover. The results were not nearly as good -- it was only when I started using the symmetrical crossovers in the AV receiver that I started to get somewhat happy with a sub/bookshelf system for music -- and by that time I had already bought M60s and had cheerfully deep-sixed the sub for everything except DVDs.