I kept getting hung up on how the M80s were "smaller speakers" until I looked at your first post from 2012 about having some beasts with 12" woofers.
Anyway, this topic comes up from time to time and to quickly summarize:
1) People have different tastes and likes. Some perceive product X is better than product Y based off of real information, side by side (or blind) tests, and so forth, and others just base their decision off of marketing or even price... I mean pay more and it is better, right? (Like this guy I work with who has a fully loaded, $60,000 Lincoln that is in the shop ALL OF THE TIME. It is a nice ride, but his wife's Kia Optima for $34,000 just works great and has pretty much the same bells and whistles. At almost half the cost, the Kia seems like a better buy. It is a tad smaller, but gets-up-and-goes about as well.) A lot of people pay for a certain brand or model of something because it is some sort of status symbol, but in the end it might be a big lemon. They will never admit to it, and to make themselves feel better, they spend their days trolling on the internet to bash other products that they have never heard, just to make themselves feel better about their mediocre but pricey purchase.
2) Some people have bad blood with a company. No need to name names, but a lot of people here know who these people are. Of course, when that bad blood happens to be a guy who runs a fairly popular A/V web site, he spews his unjustified bias all over the place, and people think that because someone owns a web site means that they must be an expert, or knowledgeable, or heck, even honest. We have seen some bad blood with another guy who did actually own some Axiom products and it seems like his life revolves around just slamming Axiom at every twist and turn. It started with subwoofers where he compared internal bracing to someone else and since the Axiom had less, it was total crap in his mind. Completely black and white world for this guy. It seems like he only torn into Axiom products to "expose" them, but never took a long hard look at a number of competitors. Just one or two where he could make his point.
So yes, people are entitled to their opinions, and I am not saying that Axioms are the pinnacle of audio, but they are damn good, and not just "for the money," and I have learned that the biggest leap forward in performance with a "damn good" speaker is not to go to a different brand, but is to focus on the space in which that speaker is listened too. This has become huge for me lately. I have owned my Axioms for what will be 10 years this year. They sound SO much better in a treated space that I am in now than they did in my 2 previous home theaters that used the exact same speakers (minus the 2nd pair of QS8s). The room was as big of a performance boost (literally) as when I bought my Axioms and replaced my crappy, poorly made KLH speakers.
Hopefully that "summary" helps.
