Attn prospective buyers:
Maybe it was years of waiting and I built it up in my mind to be something more fantastic than it really could ever be, but right now I'm a bit disappointed in my new Epic 80 7.1 setup.
Delivery took a couple days longer than I expected (FedEx tracking was worthless and it came on the wrong day from what it said-- they should use UPS), and the boxes were totally trashed. Right out the box I noticed, that despite good efforts at packaging, the M80's had dings in the corners as did the EP500. Upon closer inspection I found that about 4" of the foam surrounding the driver cone wasn't glued down. Overall I think the build quality is very impressive, but I think the guy in quality control was asleep on the job the day my speakers were built.
Axiom very quickly, and graciously, has sent me out a new driver for the EP500. So they win the award for great customer service.
The supplied wall mount brackets for the Q's were a bit poorly designed in a "T" shape. Basically it requires you to mount the "T" on to a wall stud, which is fine. But then the arms of the "T" flex off the wall when you hang the speaker. If you pull down on the speaker it bends, and I would assume that over time they would bend naturally since they are thin gauage steel. This means you have to put drywall anchors in and screw the entire "T" to the wall with no less than 5 screws. On the other hand the "FULL METAL BRACKET" is exceptionally well designed and works fantastically. Although the screws it came with were cheap and the heads stripped out... I replaced them with some standard drywall screw with good results. Additional note, when using the "T" bracket you can't use banana plugs because the terminals aren't recessed far enough.
After about 5 hours of careful setup I had the system going and turned it up to a decent volume and put in my BluRay copy of Spiderman with the Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1 sound track and was waiting for the pictures to fall off the wall. But alas, a small vibration was all I had to show for my efforts. It sounded good, but for a speaker setup that cost literally 10 times what my old ones did I wasn't 10X impressed. Maybe my Pioneer elite 94TXH isn't powerful enough or maybe my theater is too big (likely) for a single EP500? Hopefully with more break-in and additional tweaks I can make some pictures fall off the wall and finely be happy. Otherwise I think an additonal EP500 is in my future.
Its still to early to say how the other speakers in the system hold up to close scrutiny, but right now I feel the $2000 spent on the 94TXH was a better investment than the new speakers.
