Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners The M80's will be here on Friday

That was pretty darn fast. I will try setting them up about 6" off the back wall, and 1 foot off the side to start. Fireing strait ahead. See how that works out. The M80's are not as tall as the Polk SDA 1C's, but are deeper. So even tho the Polks are 1 foot off the back wall, the M80 will really be sitting in the same position as far as the front of the speakers goes. So i'm not going to move my seating position...just see how it works. Once i feel i have the speakers in a good position. I will attempt to make some comparisions between the two speakers.

I'm not sure comparing a 25 year old speaker to a new one, is really fair or that informative. But since the SDA's were not normal speakers to begin with, may prove interesting.

glad you are enjoying Bob, I did a comparison about a year ago against my Pioneer speakers from the 80's, and suprisingly the Pioneers sounded pretty darn good against the 80's. Of course it was not a "true" blind A/B test.

I'm sure those magic plastic fins under the tweeter have a lot to do with the excellence of he Pioneers.

the Pioneer has a family look with the old JBL pro monitors.
i'd love to hear them.

It is a 4 way speaker, that is actually a driver, a think it had 2 tweeters, a ribbon and some other design.

It is funny how speaker designs changed just in a relatively short time. According to all the stuff I have ever read, one of the primary reasons why pretty well all the companies got away from the large driver wide cabinets and went to the tall narrow deep cabinetry with smaller drivers was because of sound diffraction. If you put that old Pioneer speaker on a scope it would probably measure that many of the frequencies at various points, especially the highs, would be lost or at minimum be considerably affected by sound moving along the width of the cabinet. When all the companies that used the NRC in formulating their speaker designs(including Axiom)to provide a speaker that was as transparent, neutral and accurate as possible and the significant change that resulted, the current designs best met that requirement.

Whether bookshelf or floor standing, regardless of manufacturer it is pretty common across the board to see cabinetry not much wider than the speaker itself, all done to minimize diffraction. I am sure there are other reasons as well and with his wealth of experience, Alan Lofft could probably provide an in-depth explanation as to the history here.

In the end, having said all the above, in the real world if it sounds good to you that is all that matters.

WOW...that's one BIG Pioneer speaker. Did they still try and call that a bookshelf speaker back then? Is that a 15" in there?
It must weigh a ton..LOL