Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Very clever designed speaker by Outlaw Audio

I'm sure many of you have seen this already. I figured it was a great design since we always talk about can I use a center vertical, or can I use a M22 horizontally. They have created a speaker with 2 crossovers, with a switch depending on the orientation you want. What a great concept for matching LCR.

http://outlawaudio.com/products/lcr.html

Neat! 5..4..3..2..1 until someone asks why Axiom hasn't done that, you lazy slackers who don't really care about your customers!

Interesting idea, but honestly they should probably offer the same speaker with your choice of orientation, vertical or horizontal use. You'd think offering a switchable crossover would add unnecessary cost to the end product since the majority of people know what they want when they spend that kind of jing. Still, it's very interesting what they did.

Emotiva uses such a feature applied to the surrounds - bipole/dipole switch.

What they should do is come up with two different baffle designs for uncompromised driver placement, and then accompany those layouts with optimized crossovers.

Yeah, what were those designers/engineers thinking, they should listen to us, yeah.

Agreed. There's a name for that... um, oh yeah, I think they call it a dedicated center.

Reading the Outlaw site, the claim is that the dual crossovers allow for "optimal performance" in either a vertical or horizontal position. If that's supposed to mean that the performance when horizontal is just as good as when vertical, that's highly unlikely. While horizontal configurations do require different crossover adjustments to minimize their problems, this doesn't make things even; crossover changes can't do everything. It's highly likely that while horizontal performance is significantly improved with the new crossover, the performance while vertical using the vertically optimized crossover is still superior.

ICBM-2 on the way soon as well...

Ooooooohhhhhh..... pretty!

Where's the wide channels?

I'm surprised it has height, because this device is designed to do the bass management in an analog setup (i.e. using the analog outs of a BD player). There are no players that output anything more than 7.1 (what's on the disc).

With the variable output this could function very well as a multi-channel pre-amp for someone wanting to go and stay analog right out of the player. The player would need to be able to do channels trims, and delay, though. (My Pioneer DVD player does both, and suffers from pretty poor bass management.)

Still, I'd rather use HDMI to a full-function receiver.

I am quite surprised that Outlaw, although in an updated form, has decided to resurrect this particular design. Prior to owning an HDMI equipped AVR, I had an ICBM-1 that was designed for primarily getting the most out of DVD players that had SACD and DVD Audio capabilities. It provided much superior and versatile bass management in the analog domain than what was available in the players themselves. HDMI connections pretty much eliminated that requirement and the ICBM-1 really didn't stay around that long.

I am only assuming here with some of the "juiced-up" analog circuitry of players like the forthcoming Oppo BDP95 and others, there seems to be a demand for analog connections. I would only hope the circuitry on this new model is superior to the previous, since, as good as it was, the ICBM-1 did add some noticeable noise to the signal path.