Dr. House,

The Axiom listening tests are set up by an Axiom technician (Debbie, for those who met her at the 30th Anniversary), not by Ian, nor Andrew Welker, nor myself. Strict protocol and statiscal analysis are employed, as they were for years at the National Research Council.

We keep a variety of different brands of speakers on hand, so anyone participating cannot assume they are listening to Axiom speakers.

Re. the speaker shuffler. Dr. Toole introduced this in the Harman lab, when he left the NRC, thanks to the enormous financial resources of Harman International. The protocol that was used at the NRC was as follows: Each speaker being tested was rotated through four different locations behind the acoustically transparent curtain; in addition, each member of the listening panel rotated through five different seating locations. After a couple of days, all members had sat in each of the listening seats, and auditioned all the speakers in all of the locations, thus randomizing the room/location variables.

The speaker shuffler is an elegant albeit costly solution. However, the speaker and listener locations can be removed as variables through the time-consuming process outlined above.

And to JBall: I have never stated that there is no speaker that is better than the M80s. I certainly haven't heard all the speakers in the world! And there may be one out there that in double-blind tests I'd choose, or rank higher than the M80s. But I have heard many very good expensive speakers and plenty of equally good modestly priced ones, a large enough sample that I can confidently state that there is no necessary correlation of loudpspeaker sound quality with price.

By the way, your car analogy doesn't hold.

Alan


Alan Lofft,
Axiom Resident Expert (Retired)