Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Which Power Source for M60ti? Newbie.

It is interesting the idea of progression to be able to give you a standing point as to what is good. I also find it very interesting as to how speaker design has very much changed over the years and I think that was very much driven by the work at NRC with Ian (and Axiom) being part and parcel with that.

When I think back to my first "real" home stereo, not something that was bought at consumers distributing and was little more than a speaker thrown in a box. The understanding of what was going on was very much above most people. I will even say that some of that holds true to this day in some manufacturers I don't think understood the concept of reflection that really makes up the Axiom term 'family of curves'. The approach before was more of a trial by error and throw into the design to try and reduce the effects you don't want without the understanding of why they were there in the first place.

I take a look at my first set of speakers a Celestian DL6. Compared to anything else that I had heard at the time, it was the best sounding speaker that I could afford. Looking back at the process of buying these, I might as well closed my eyes and pointed because I was buying without any basis.

I went to BayBloor Radio that at the time was really well advertised as being a higher-end store..compared to the other big chain stores at the time. I went into a big room that was much wider than deep that had a row of speakers all setup in a row. Not like a listening room you'd get now, but individual pairs of speakers with its own stereo connected, one after another. So there was ZERO consideration for acoustics. The two units at either end sounded worse than the ones in the middle. It clearly was buying on what looked nice and didn't cost more than I could afford.

It wasn't until many years later that I had the same speakers in my own room that my father wanted to get some speakers for himself. He found a set of Celestian SL3 speakers used that were at a good price advertised on craigslist. The owner drove the speakers over to our house and we hooked them up to my stereo (the Nakamichi that just died) that I actually heard a remarkable improvement over what I owned. So he bought them and I was left with knowing my speakers sucked. The power of A/B done far better than what was common at the time.

One would think you'd learn, but when I got married and a better job, I bought a new set of Energy C3 speakers, not based on sound but rather many magazine reviews and they were getting cleared out on sale so the price was right. My logic was that if you can get a really good reviewed speaker for 60% off then your getting a deal. A/B side by side comparison to the Celestian showed they were far better. At around the same time the understanding of sound in speaker design started to come into the light. I listened to many speakers at different dealerships and audio shows. The sound capability was awesome, but the price was beyond my reach. Again, it can be also that exposure to sound is limited to what you can remember, driven by feelings at the time. Without a true blind A/B or at least a controlled A/B in your own environment, how can you say what is better than what?