Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo n00b's speakers arrived =)

That and if the club requires a uniform, it’s a worthless endeavor. -- Carlin

Thats a great find! Like everyone else, I couldn't agree more on the sound.

There are lots of reasons a person could find speakers bright. Interestingly, the term bright was originally meant to describe a speaker that had a more 'live' sound. If I understand correctly it was meant as a compliment to the speaker. Me personally, I like the crispness or edge of live sound. Its one of the reasons I like live recordings.

I am willing to bet that one of the biggest contributors is rooms with lots of reflective surfaces. Such a room would not be forgiving of a speaker that produces all the highs that are supposed to be there.

Now that I have gotten used to the idea of speakers that produce everything on a disc, I notice more and more, instruments and sections of songs where I can hear the extra high frequency energy from reflections in my concrete box (aka room that sucketh). I always noticed it with pipe organ music because those pipes just put out a lot of sound energy, but I am beginning to appreciate the more subtle effects of my room.

Another thing I find funny is that with a speaker like the B&W 802D, flat frequency response means you can use eq to tailor the speaker to the sound you want. Whith a 'lesser' speaker, its just bright or harsh.

Hi,

Yes, needless to say, I've seen the S&V review and the reveiwer's comments that he prefers "dark-sounding speakers". Translated, that means he likes low-fidelity speakers with dull, muted highs and a depressed midrange. Weird indeed!

The Audiobytes, like all of Axiom's speakers, aim for a smooth, wide frequency response, the underlying objective being overall linearity through all the musical octaves. A speaker should NOT superimpose its own colorations and irregularities on top of the music being reproduced. It should reproduce what's in the original source, with no tonal additions or subtractions of its own. If the source recording is at fault, the speaker should reveal it; if you don't like what you hear then you might be able to improve things with a touch of EQ or the tone controls.

If the S&V reviewer bothered to do double-blind listening tests, he might be chagrined to discover, like hundreds of others who've participated in such tests, that the speakers he picked as sounding most natural (or "best", however you want to interpret it) would be the most linear and exhibit the smoothest overall response through bass, midrange and treble. Decades of such tests (in which Axiom has participated) have demonstrated the very high statistical corrleation between smooth, linear response in measurements and the preferences of listeners in blind tests. That is how I do the listening tests to all of Axiom's protoypes and production speakers, and that's how I did the tests with the Audiobytes, even comparing several different crossover designs with an A/B comparator.

In sharp contrast to the S&V review, here's a recent review of the Audiobytes published at MyMac, by a reviewer who clearly knows smooth, transparent sound when he hears it:

http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=3430

By the way, the reviewer asked to purchase the Audiobyte review system after the review appeared.

Regards,

Alan

Hi schizm42,

I'm delighted you're pleased with the balanced wide-range response and natural, detailed sound quality of the M60s. By the way, the M22's midrange and highs are very similar to the M60s; of course the 60s have much more extended bass output and a more robust upper bass.

Re tone-in, tone-out. Make sure the tone controls (or EQ settings) are at the center detents. While all tone-control and EQ circuits should ideally be neutral when the controls are centered, they never are. Because they are essentially filters, the frequency response through those circuits may show deviations as large as 1 or 2 dB, and those errors are usually in the midrange where our hearing is most sensitive, which is likely what you heard. Using the tone-out setting will remove the circuitry from the signal path totally so the electronic frequency response should be quite linear.

Regards,

Alan

wow, its cool to hear the reasons behind the tone control differences =)

And yeah, I do really appreciate the accuracy of the sound. there are a couple of tracks I've been trying to figure out exactly what the drummer has been doing on for years, and I finally was able to this morning because of the detail and separation i hear among different drums on these here M60s =)

To me the adjective "dark" to describe the Axiom M80s has become a compliment with regard to revelation of all of the latent nuance that's hidden in the shadows of the soundtrack, the pianissimo, the oboe, the buried horn or string.

I have come to love the sound of dark, it's moody, it's uplifting, it's enlightening, it's more real, especially in comparison to electronic bright . . .

The experience of overly bright only seems to come into play at high volumes, when the axiom treble still comes on as neutral, balanced, and strong as it does at moderate volumes.

To me this seems an intriguing anomaly: with crappy equipment you have to boost loudness to generate excitement at low volumes but with axiom equipment you may have to tame the sonic reality of balanced frequency response at high volumes? I suspect audio engineering of the recordings may play a hand in the tweaks necessary to maximize realism, since they must be anticipating our playback equipment.

I'm starting to wonder if I do need dynamic eq when the commercials come on and to combat compression, but at low to moderate volumes on satellite tv, the presentation is pristine.

Alan, that's classic! The guy dumps on the speakers in the magazine and then asks to buy them. I hope you told him no.

Jason

Nice Mark.

From Alan's message I think it was the Mymac reviewer who wanted to buy them.