Thanks for the kind words and also for the participation.

Ian takes a different approach to how he thinks his products should be viewed. Most company owners want to talk about the drivers, the crossover, the technology ... basically ... the HARDWARE used in building the speakers.

A lot of forum "gurus" buy into this. "A ribbon tweeter must be superior" ... "the diamond infused midrange" ... that type of talk.

Everything Axiom (and Bryston) does in terms of speaker development involves blind testing. It never stops. If a change is made in a crossover, it's made because of results of hours of blind listening.

This has been a policy for two decades.

MOST companies HATE blind testing, especially the higher priced ones.

A pleasant surprise two weeks ago when I brought up the topic of blind tests with a Vice President at Def Tech. I expected to be told how useless they are, but got quite the opposite. They are also dedicated to the blind test in developing speakers.

Ian, besides being passionate about good customer service, is also quite entertaining when telling you what he expects from a blind test. This is as close to a quote as I can give, based on memory ... it went something like this:

"Craig, if our speaker sounds terrible under blind conditions, then it's a terrible speaker"

When reading the material from Floyd E. Toole, one fascinating "find" they had in their testing is this:

GOOD sounding speakers, under blind tests, were universally liked by the panel. This does not mean all got the same results, but they got results that were consistent, with people preferring accurate sound every time versus a speaker with a "coloring" of the sound.

The preference levels under blind tests are always closer than in sighted tests.

As an example (and this is just a hypothetical for illustration), let's say we have a highly regarded $5000 per pair monitor being tested against a $400 monitor.

Sighted, let's say that, on a scale of 1 to 10, the $5000 speaker scored a 9.5 while the $400 speaker scored a 6 ... in blind tests, the score would be 9 to 8.5.

And the double blind - as is done at Axiom - is even more brutal.

If we have a GTG here, it will be as close to a double blind test as one can get. We have 8 different high end speakers available. This will allow us to do a test in which the listener has no clue what speaker is playing.