Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Confession #4 billion

Geez Ken, i just saw the post. How many years did you wait for the M50s and now within how short a span you own two models?!
You must've won the lottery.
Party at Ken's place.

It was a few years, indeed... And to be completely honest, that was a few years for any Axiom speakers.

I was all set to pick a pair of T45 or T55s and enter them into an extended listening experiment with the M22s. But the store, of course, was out of stock. Now, I'm starting to wonder what's going on with this dealer. They had recently moved to another location. Originally, they stocked the upper lines of PSB and B&W, but now they only stock the image line and the 600 series of B&W, and they recently added Yamaha speakers to their line up. I auditioned some demo B&W 603S3 towers which were being sold off for a 40 percent discount and I thought they sounded dreadful. If you want anything else, you have to order it. Another thing I noticed is that all of the old salesmen/audio experts who were in there 30s and 40s have disappeared and have been replaced by teenagers. It kind of makes a guy wonder how long they will actually be in town. And how difficult it will be to get work down on anything I purchase from them in the future. Once again the M60s/M80s are starting to look more inviting.

I think a lot of stores are feeling that they have to decide whether to focus on high end audio, keep their margins, but with relatively low sales levels, or to focus on home theater, cut their costs and margins, and have a chance to grow or at least remain reasonably large. I guess your store has made their choice.

I imagine they are making those changes in the hope that they *won't* go away.

It's sad, really. Even if dealer A does a good job and adds value, if dealers B, C and D do a crappy job then we start to lose faith in dealers and end up buying online at the lowest price we can find and rely on communities like this to provide the support and guidance that we used to get from dealers.

I have to admit I have seen so much bad info from dealers in the last couple of years (while my friends were shopping for HT systems) that it's hard to argue in favour of the old "reasonable margins, experienced staff" dealer model any more except for the high end / low volume suppliers who can afford to be picky about who resells their gear.

Congrats, Ken! I'm very happy for you, even if you did leap-frog the true gem of the Axiom lineup.

Looking forward to hearing them some time.