Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Waiting for Godot

How odd, I posted a response a half hour ago but it did not go through, must have hit "delete" rather than "send", oops!

To reiterate, I appreciate your response, and I suspect you have hit the nail on the head, it seems the Polks may have a limited dynamic range, for example I was playing Peter Gabriel's Up and it sounded beautiful except I had to lunge for the remote control and my daughter had to plug her ears after a dramatic shift in volume and the volume was only set at a a tiny jillionth of a smidgeon to begin with.

The ability to match dynamic range to source in an aesthetic manner I believe is a crucial element of HT and clearly music as well given the current example.

OK so I checked out what's happening and my setup is FUBAR, will post back when I can fix things and give realistic assessment of my impressions, please disregard previous posts until such time . . .

Ouch!

More FUBAR'd than auditioning the Epic 80 with no sub plugged in? I'm sure in perspective it's not that bad.

Good one! Axiom called and located the package, it was on a different truck with a different tracking number but arrived in town last night and is out for delivery today.

Fedex delivered the 2nd M80!

Now for the hard part, I have no working preamp to power the XPA2. Last night I realized that I was only getting the right channel out of the Rotel preamp (via the headphone jack which apparently is broken) which of course messed up the speaker comparison because I was unable to vary the volume by channel/speaker to give the M80 more gain like I thought I was doing.

On Monday evening when I finally had a chance to look at the Rotel and see that it had no pre out jack I ordered an rxv 663, however I just called the company and they have been out on holiday the past two days so the order has not even been processed.

Looks like my only move now is to hook up the M80s to the Rotel (50 wpc into 8 ohms) and see how they sound.

It's unfortunate, I was getting a great sound out of the XPA2/Rotel combo with just a tad of noise at rest due to the unorthodox connection via the headphone jack and would have been very pleased with that while waiting for a real pre/pro to arrive, but one channel or mono or whatever I'm getting obviously doesn't cut it. I opened up the Rotel of course but the headphone jack is encased in plastic so there is no way to operate on it.

Have both M80s plugged in now and the sound is just spectacular! Definitely getting chills from listening, love the detail especially on the strings and female voices, that I've noticed so far. I have to turn the Rotel up 3/4 of the way and it's still underpowered, hesitant to turn the amp up more and expose the speakers to any distortion.

Sound is just as I remembered from the audition, thanks Jason!

Excellent! Welcome to the club of happy M80 owners (and listeners )!

Yet another happy M80 owner, congrats!.

Thanks guys, my wife auditioned the M80s tonight and stated that they were very intense, modern looking, and had a great subwoofer , all meant as compliments, so it looks like we are on track to smoothly flesh out the rest of the surround system without any opposition due to the WAF.

The sound absolutely blew away the Polks I am replacing, especially for HT content, we watched The Fringe and the background music was just so cool sounding and atmospheric, which is exactly what I felt was missing before.

I don't find the M80s to be bright at all, it's funny how people could even say that, I guess everything's relative to what you're familiar with.

I'll probably order the rest altogether so I can get the 5% discount off everything, the only hitch is the ep800, I can't put that in the cart unless/until I get an invite to the owner's club