I enjoyed your post very much Lobo (is it alright to call you Lobo? Or do you prefer Sir Lobo?), FINALLY someone who can stick to a budget!!!
As for the preium Axiom product. Although I realize that up there at Axiom they feel the M80 is the ultimate in design theory, I too would be very interested in a special edition M80 with higher grade drivers, and perhaps a premium crossover as well... just for shits & giggles. Not to say that the hardware installed in our M80's aren't any good. I enjoy mine daily, no complaints here. But someone mentined in another thread that SVS's tweeters cost $180 bucks each, or something like that, and that got me to thinking what Axiom could do with some ultra-premium components in their towers.
That's not to say that a $180 dollar tweeter necessarily sounds better than a $90 dollar tweeter, but we all know the old saying, "it doesn't matter how big, or how fast you are... there's always someone out there who's bigger and/or faster". Therefore while the drivers Axiom uses in their speakers definately do a great job, at a fantastic price-point, I for one would be super interested in seeing what they could do with even better components. Call them "Super M80's", or "M80 Ultra's" or something like that. Charge two or three times their normal price. But other than the innards, don't change anything else, keep the same design theory and everything. A few extra custom finishes would be alright, but that isn't really what I'm concerned about.
What really peaks my curiousity is finding out how much further Axiom can take a great sounding, yet affordable speaker. If the current M80's can compete with speakers costing two to three times as much, could a set of M80's with truely top-shelf components compete with speakers in the $10,000 to $15,000 dollar range? Or do the compenents they now use match up with the cabinet design so perfectly that another arrangement simply would not work? I guess what I'm asking is are the M80's truely the very best speakers Axiom knows how to build? Or are they the very best speakers they can build while retaining an obtainable price tag by a large portion of the consumer base?
I understand Ian's philosophy has always been build the best speakers the customer can afford to buy. I'd just like to know what he's capable of building without that restriction.
