I understand you frustrations and can sympathize with them. We don’t all have 4 or 5 grand to shell out on a company’s flagship receiver. We look at the specs try to form intelligent questions and get the opinions of others, and in most cases the opinions of others are based on the same information you have. Unless you run across somebody that has the same unit and has tried exactly what you are doing; you don’t get a voice of experience. What you get is the opinion of a lot of users some very a lot of experience and others with limited experience that have similar products and have done this successfully or unsuccessfully whatever the case may be. As previously stated that if I or anybody else with some measure of experience looks at the specs for your unit, I would expect given the details that Onkyo have put down in their spec sheet that this unit should work with the 80’s and that the only problem I would expect to see is that the unit would run a little hot. If I had bought the speakers and then run into the problems you have I would begin by looking at all the variables that can affect my unit from working correctly. Remember this unit now has to work harder to drive these speakers then it would running an 8 ohm load. So these would include dirty power, wiring problems, speaker connectors that have strands shorting to the other binding posts, and also making calls to Onkyo. I think the flaming begins with your statements that Axiom deliberately miss leads customers just to sell speakers. Show me some proof of this, I cannot find any searching through the posts or the Faqs. When I look at this I find that the Onkyo specs could also be construed as miss leading. So who is really to blame here, the speaker maker for putting out 4 ohm speakers, Thier opinion of whether or not this should work is based on experience of others and the specs given by Onkyo, or is the receiver manufacturer to blame for not making the unit capable of driving 4 ohm speakers? They do not in their literature clainm to be able to run 4 ohm but they do for some reason given a power output rating for speakers down to 3 ohms; which I find a little amusing and given your experience miss-leading.
