I appreciate the note, but unfortunately i do not subscribe to the belief of speaker break in. Axiom tests each speaker before it goes out the door in a few ways and i recall Ian saying to me during my first factory tour that any break in would occur in the first few seconds of a driver oscillating at thousands of reps. That aside, the character i'm hearing with the new M60 (v4) is the same character i hear with the LFR880. The LFR were refurbs and as such, long broken in by anyone's standards.
Now i do believe that this character difference stems from the crossover and driver changes they've made over time. My M60s are Ti which were followed by v2, v3 and v4 (not all revisions had major hardware changes though). Axiom speakers long had a reputation for being bright to the point of harsh, edgy which people ascribed to its metal drivers and tweeter (because metal should sound harsh and tinny right? {sigh}). I observed this brightness the first time i ordered them as well and waited it out a few weeks listening to let myself adapt to the new sound (my old reference was a Panasonic built Technics system that had a 3-way driver bookshelf). I had still found the highs to be too high and at the time Axiom would provide people with a resistor you could connect inline to the tweeter to reduce its output by a couple of dB. Ultimately bright recordings were still hard on the ears at 'reference' SPL and i know they were working on taming some of this. I would say they accomplished that, but almost too much?
I came across an article online that defines my thought on recessed midrange and vocals vs. a more forward, perhaps bright, speaker.
https://audioaural.com/should-treble-be-higher-than-bass-the-3-reasons-why-you-should/Reasons 2, 3 and 4 are exactly my thoughts. If the upper midrange and vocals get muddied because they are not prominent enough, they get lost in the music.
I remember hearing Oasis for the first time on the Axiom system and at the time, compression of songs was a big thing. The music was so loud in comparison to the vocals that the result was what one can describe as distortion. There's just some Oasis songs i cannot listen to much at all. BrenR once explained this many moons ago in a manner that was easily understandable and i don't really recall anymore (paraphrasing).
Anyway, I have a stereophile friend coming over today to give a listen. Also had the wife listen to each comparison as well. I'll post something specifically on these trials at some point once all the notes are done. They won't be pages upon pages of details on microdynamic idiosyncrasies though. I'm generally listening for
-bass (things like tightness, boomy/accuracy),
-midrange (accuracy/details, clarity/muddy),
-upper and vocals (clarity, harshness),
-soundstage (depth, wideness, rich/thin).
The hard part about comparing is that the reference sound changes each time. One can compare M60 to a Tannoy, but then compare the ADS to the LFR and you cannot relate that to the M60/Tannoy test until you pit the M60 vs the LFR, etc. Without a standardized scoring system, one could not easily go back and state "yes the M60 has the lowest bass score, the LFR has the highest midrange clarity" etc. rather than "the M60 has more bass than the ADS, but the M60 has less bass than the Tannoy" and make the assumption that the ADS therefore would have less bass than the Tannoy, but until you compare the two directly, it isn't always that cut and dried.
