Hi,
Yes, needless to say, I've seen the S&V review and the reveiwer's comments that he prefers "dark-sounding speakers". Translated, that means he likes low-fidelity speakers with dull, muted highs and a depressed midrange. Weird indeed!
The Audiobytes, like all of Axiom's speakers, aim for a smooth, wide frequency response, the underlying objective being overall linearity through all the musical octaves. A speaker should NOT superimpose its own colorations and irregularities on top of the music being reproduced. It should reproduce what's in the original source, with no tonal additions or subtractions of its own. If the source recording is at fault, the speaker should reveal it; if you don't like what you hear then you might be able to improve things with a touch of EQ or the tone controls.
If the S&V reviewer bothered to do double-blind listening tests, he might be chagrined to discover, like hundreds of others who've participated in such tests, that the speakers he picked as sounding most natural (or "best", however you want to interpret it) would be the most linear and exhibit the smoothest overall response through bass, midrange and treble. Decades of such tests (in which Axiom has participated) have demonstrated the very high statistical corrleation between smooth, linear response in measurements and the preferences of listeners in blind tests. That is how I do the listening tests to all of Axiom's protoypes and production speakers, and that's how I did the tests with the Audiobytes, even comparing several different crossover designs with an A/B comparator.
In sharp contrast to the S&V review, here's a recent review of the Audiobytes published at MyMac, by a reviewer who clearly knows smooth, transparent sound when he hears it:
http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=3430 By the way, the reviewer asked to purchase the Audiobyte review system after the review appeared.
Regards,
Alan
