John2013
Thank you for your very well written post. Oddly I just commented on these sorts of posts in another thread as it is stuff like this that allows us to review and improve how we do things at Axiom.
Personally I always hate when asked to give an opinion on a direct comparison of a particular model speaker from another company to one of ours. That said I totally understand why someone would ask the question too. The majority of times we do comparisons to competitor products are when they are brought to us by an owner wishing to do their own A/B comparison, which we will partake in. Most of the measuring and double blind listen testing we do, and it is going on pretty much continuously, is about isolating particular measurements and empirically testing their relevance to the listening experience. These are the building blocks of always moving forward with our designs.
I should hope that if anyone from Axiom is making comparison comments that they have firsthand experience with said products, and I am fairly confident that is the case. But even then it is still most likely going to just be their opinion as there are very few places that have the set up to do controlled double blind listen testing. Most likely just the NRC and a handful of speaker companies, like Axiom, that use double blind testing as part of their research. To complicate matters more it is highly unlikely the said comparison was done in the recent past and the fact is that I would imagine just like us that our competitors are always making product improvements. So out past a year or so these sorts of comparisons are getting a bit stale.
If you ever have the chance to spend some time doing blind listen testing it is an “eye opening” experience. Differences among well designed products are much smaller than one would imagine. In fact the term “similarily good” was originally coined during my NRC days back in the 80s. I believe it was Floyd who came up with it. In double blind listening tests involving two or more well designed products the scores would end up coming out pretty close with a lot of back and forth amongst the various listeners. Though these products would not necessarily sound exactly the same they would both score very high and, when all averaged out, pretty much the same; hence the term “similarily good”. I can see from your post that this term is not well understood and frankly why would it be. Its actually meaning is a compliment to all speakers in the discussion. To say you believe they would be similarily good means you believe they are all well designed products.
In closing I think I may organize a conference call amongst all of us at Axiom that interact with customers and post publicly, and go through your comments one by one to see if we can put together a congruent dos and don’ts list that we all abide by. I think we will probably lose the “similarily good” comment.
