Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions speaker weight

Hey, Alan, thanks for answer.

Funny you know the Revel-designer guy. Seems spekaer design companies are like my job, couple companies doing basically engineer recycling from a small pool of experienced guys ;-) I think after Axioms I'll try to sneak by my wife something like Revels and use the M80s for my home-theatre setup. Interesting you find them pretty good, I heard couple others ~20K and Revels stroke me as pretty outstanding bar some electrostats. Will be a hard choice between the two ;-)

As well, nothing against M80s, anything up to $8-10K I heard had a hard time to sound better and I'm _very_ happy with the purchase and glad I didn't go for high-end Alphas. I recommend the Axioms highly to anybody who can cope with a black, ugly cube. Actually, to be frank, I think you're missing in your line-up some smallish cubes to compete with someone like Bose. Most times I help people with sound with end up with the minicubes, size overrides sound quality often unless it's a dedicated hi-fi room.

As to your suggestion, yes, I'll take some fun out of the whole thing and do some blind testing to see whether there is a difference ;-) Right now my impression is there's a tradef-off, my soundstage is wider and more 'solid' but instrument placement smears a tad with aroiund 12kg on each M80.

Yes, Robert is surely a tad too-high-strung-refined for my abilities, budget and taste but I failed to find a more solid and accessible book than his. I think he's still a voice of reason and authority in this corner of the world and best source to explain the current (maybe incomplete sometimes) scientific thinking of what's going on in high-end sound. He surely reads his 'stereophile' as well ;-)

-- tony

WHAT black, ugly cubes? AFAIK, Axiom doesn't make any black, ugly cubes... And the M2s are already pretty darn small. If someone wants crap, let them buy Cambridge Soundworks or Bose. Preferably Cambreidge Soundworks...

Tony, perhaps Alan's comment on Bob Harley was a bit too subtle. His book is certainly "accessible", but "solid" or "scientific"? Hardly, and it's viewed with derision by audio engineers. Dr. Ken Pohlmann's book on digital audio certainly isn't as accessible, but also isn't a collection of audio voodoo.

Hey John, ok, thanks for the pointer, next thing to look up. I ment Harvey being 'solid' compared to much other stuff that I read in the sense that he takes time to explain terminology and his appendices are quite informative, solid introduction to the effects in audio. Gave me a good starting point. Of course I don't believe after fiddling around that power cables they make a difference, but guess what, my puresilver digital coax sounds better than groenberg I got originally, and I hear it in a blind test I discovered. So I don't disparage lots of Harvey's stuff easily, only after playing around with gear and seeing for myself whether I can hear a difference.

So let's see what Dr. Pohlmann has to say ;-)

So, got to test seriously the bottles-with-sand vs. none approach and guess what, no, I can't tell the difference, especially after I moved speakers much closer to back-wall to get more bass out of them (the bass was thin far of the wall, probably also my first generation TacT preamp).

The bottles went, now based on a hunch from someone who was very successfull with that, got thin cork plates, then 2" granite slabs (ouch, my back, I don't even want to think how to do blind testing with 30lbs under each speaker ;-), then M80s with rubber feet on top. Idea is not to try to weight the speaker to stop cabinet resonance but to perfectly decouple from floor. First impression is good, will do more testing and report.

Recently fell in love with some B&W 802s, what I heard with just ho-hum electronics (Marantz) behind them was very, very sweet compared to my setup, especially in mids. Bass is way better with my setup but I have tuned setup and they played it in a crappy room against walls.

So, that one went quick. Detectable improvement after blind testing, not absolutely dramatic but very pleasant. The soundstage went from a tad 2-D to much more depth, especially things like organs, jazz ensembles have much better depth placement of instruments. The other very noticable thing is that the decay of things like piano is much 'truer', tremollo and drastic stops are much more noticable. Only slightly noticable is that some edginess went out from Sses and Tes on female vocal, much less radical change than going to silver interconnects though. Almost no downside, maybe the instruments are not as clearly defined as before and some low bass is less pronounced (albeit I don't know whether I just had a room mode before that even TacT didn't get).

Anybody using spikes on carpet and wanting to drag heavy stone plates around should try this I would say but as usual, your mileage may vary. My setup was:
a) thin cork plates (about 10x10 inch)
b) about 1- 1 1/2 inch thick granite plates
c) Axiom rubber feet