Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Axiom bashing

Stymie, you have the exact setup I'm thinking about getting with the HK and monoblocks and speakers. How have you liked that setup? Have there been any drawbacks.
And yes I do realize we should only take such comments/opinions with a grain of salt. Especially from the deranged.

The brightness comes from the fact that they are so flat in the frequency response--there's no forgiveness for bad recordings, especially in the M2/22/60/80 line. The 3/50 line is a tad more forgiving. A tad. A lot of other speakers are somewhat rolled off in the treble. Certainly, many tube amps produce that effect. Some people like it.

Scuff, with regard to the vinyl peel.... I beleive the very first run of ASW cabinets had problems with the vinyl splitting along the front edges. This was pre-2001, so it's long been rectified. But the nay-sayers will drag it out for another decade for sure.

>>If I may insert a question I asked in that thread but got no reply to...where does the widespread belief that Axioms are "bright" come from? I haven't heard Axioms yet, but as I understand "bright" it should come from an emphasis in treble frequencies...but frequency response for any Axiom model shows no such thing.

"Brightness" seems to relate to response in the 2-5 KHz range. A lot of speakers have a response dip in this range because (IIRC) BBC psychoacoustic testing indicated that a response dip in this range was perceived as sounding "smoother".

Axioms are dead-flat in this range, although the M3/M40/M50 dip a bit in the off-axis response -- apparently a function of the larger cone in the 6.5" woofer-midrange. You hear the downside of the flat response in a couple of ways -- if a recording has pronounced sibilance you will hear relatively more of it on Axioms, and I have found some recordings which seem to be optimized for car stereos and sound "harsh" on my Axioms.

It's actually pretty easy to find recordings which make Axioms sound crappy -- it's just that for the kind of recordings most of us actually *listen* to (the good ones ) the flat midrange response gives Axioms an exceptional level of clarity and transparency.

As a couple of others have posted, the 6.5"-based models "split the difference" -- they sound a tiny bit less transparent on the best material but are more tolerant of crappy recordings.

FYI, Ian feels strongly that thick, heavy cabinet walls and lots of bracing are *not* the way to design the best sounding speakers.

I have had a tough time narrowing it down to a decade or a genre. The very worst recordings seem to be from the 70s and 80s -- as do the very best recordings. It's the midrange level that matters more than the high treble.

Here's a good example -- B.B. Gabor's anthology just came out on CD recently (Gabor was very popular around Toronto). The CD sounds great on my car system (the entry level system in a Dodge Magnum) but sounds harsh on my M60s.

EDIT -- I guess I could have picked an album that somebody not from Toronto might have heard of... but it *is* a good album anyways

I have very few recordings that sound bad on the Axioms, probably because I have generally owned pretty flat speakers (Rogers LS3/5A's being the exception, I guess, with their famous BBC dip ) so the albums probably would have been tossed or given away long before I bought the Axioms.

Like others have said, the M3 is a good model for that type of music. As well as the M50 and the M60 (the M60 not as much as the others, but the M60 DOES in fact "pat" you on the back instead of slapping you across the face like the M22s, based on a review at audioholcs on the M60 tower).

-Hutz