Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater M100 amp selection

Not wanting to come across as dissing your investment. It could be a wonderful unit. I am just stating my own observations and conclusions from past experience.

I would not say that my Anthem MCA5ii is a top end amp. I know there are some that are more powerful and again from past experience, very pleasant sounding but sadly way outside of my cost bracket.

But I would worry if the X4000 is an A/B amp driving 7 speakers at 125W as it weighs in at 27lbs. Compare that to my Anthem that is admittedly more powerful but over double the weight. An A/B amp would need a pretty heavy toroidal transformer and some large capacitors. Those are heavy and the weight of this unit seems rather light. Even my old Nak was over 30lbs.

What you might find is running every speaker off the unit and it will get power starved in any frequency required passage. The way they get around this is to offload the parts that pull the most power (below 100hz) off to a Sub. Set the speakers at small and all is good.

However, you then in my opinion bought the wrong speakers for the unit.

The beauty of the M100 ( I have the bigger parent LFR1100 ) is they really can play close to full range sound. Now they tell us that sub freqency is non directional. I really don't believe that as I can blindfolded easily tell the difference between my speakers running full frequency and using them small with a sub. They simply sound better running as they were designed for. they give of a presence that is more than just a sound, but a feeling of life inside the speakers. Dont sell yourself short.

Now, if you look on the used market, you can probably find quite a decent A/B amp for around the $6-700 that will make those M100 fronts just sing.

That in turn will reduce the power hungry load from the M100's off the receiver and give the other 8ohm speakers a fighting chance to play well as the 4ohm L&R will not be sucking the life out of sound stage.