Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Hearing Things Blind Test and a review of the LFR-1100's

It's been almost 3 months since the last update ... The subwoofer testing is going well. The EP800 can definitely hang with the big boys in real world listening.

With most material, it's hard to notice a difference between the EP800 and the V3601. Both are SO good that I am glad not to be trying to compete.

We just added an SVS SB16 Ultra as the third sub, and it's also an incredibly good pertormer.

The REAL reason for this post though is to bring up a "problem" with Axiom speakers ...

The LFR-1100's are so good that I can't find anything to bitch about.

What's the fun in THAT?

I own the LFR1100's and there is one clear thing to bitch about. those 3 piece speaker grills. they are a pain to align up. I'd have preferred to get a single piece set or have some form of groove or shape change that would keep them aligned up.

Sound wise, i have yet to find fault...

Have you hooked the 1100 to your ADA1500 yet have been interested in your opinion of the 1000 vs 1500.

The 1500 is hooked up, and I cannot tell a difference. I also tend to not listen to music at the levels a lot of others do, so I am not taxing either amp.

The 1500 will pretty much sound like a 1000, but have about 3 dB more headroom.

Ian and Debbie are convinced the 1500 is THE way to go. But if one is thinking in terms of dollars, the 1000 is a bargain.

So true if your not taxing the power, likely no difference.
As they are some what the same minus the power handling difference.

MatManBH .... After reading your post, I took the grills off both the M-100's and LFR-1100's, put them back on, looked at them, and repeated the process.

They all line up "perfectly" on our speakers. I have no words of wisdom why yours are a problem. We need a headscratcher emoji.

I just have OCD..

mine are out by a mm and can see they are not perfectly aligned. Every time i go into the room to listen, i have to adjust them to be perfect again.

As for the power level for the ADA amps.

I have the ADA1000-4 (as in 4 driven channels out). With the LFR1100 you have 4ohm on the front speakers and 8ohm on the rear. So my amp can deliver up to 250w of power to the front, and 125w to the rear drivers.

By comparison, the ADA1500-4 can drive 375w to the front and 325w to the rear. So you are getting 50% more power to the front and a whopping 160% more to the rear.

But, the rear speakers are just tweeters and mids, and I honestly don't see them needing anywhere need that much power as they are smaller drivers that don't need as much current as the larger 6.5" HP woofers. So driving the backs likely gain zero in added performance from a much larger amp.

So now we get to the front. You are going from 250w to 375w ... so a gain of 125w. That is quite a bit more but as Craigsub pointed out, this is a number at the high end of the volume where I believe it takes double the power for each db gain. so you've gained 3db for your more than double price tag.

What is missing inside this is dynamic peek power. Both these amps are plugged into a 15amp wall socket, so there is a limit to the amount of constant power they can pull. An ADA1000 is not limited to 250w, and can provide beyond that for short pulls. not nearly as much as the ADA1500, but what is not answered is would the amp have enough not to clip and if it did, by how much? And at what volume?

Back in the late 70's and early 80's when there was a large segment of Audio that actually loved the science end, the use of the "decibel watt" ... or dBW ... was a reference to get people to understand what happens as we add more "watts" to the equation.

It worked like this ... 1 watt = 0 dBW. Doubling the power adds 3 decibels, and ten times the power adds ten decibels.

For most of the music range - 100 to say, 5000 Hz, ten decibels "sounds twice as loud".

In other words, if we have a reference of 90 decibels, 100 decibels will sound twice as loud, but require ten times the output to sound this twice as loud.

So the scale looks like this:

0dBW = 1 watt
3 dBW = 2 watts
6 dBW = 4 watts
10 dBW = 10 watts
13 dBW = 20 watts
16 dBW = 40 watts
20 dBW = 100 watts
23 dBW = 200 watts
26 dBW = 400 watts
30 dBW = 1000 watts

The text below has the caveat that a speaker rated at, say, 87 dB for 1 watt at one meter in sensitivity will not be ruler flat at that spec (think +/- 3 dB), and also each speaker will start to compress at a certain SPL ... but it's still a good method for understanding the relationship from "watts" to "loudness in SPL"

This made it fairly easy to take a speaker's sensitivity and the appropriate dBW and come up with total output.

All ratings for SPL will be using the "dB per watt at one meter".

An 87 dB speaker and a 200 watt amp would mean adding 23 dB to the 87 dB, and that speaker would deliver 110 dB at one meter with the 200 watt / 23 dBW amp.

A 104 dB speaker and a 10 watt amp would mean adding 10 dBW, with the speaker delivering 114 dB.

This is why we often see Klipschorns using small tube amps.

Craig, you said the SB16 is giving you some good chest thumps. You also said that's an indication the sub is linear. We know however from Dale Rasco's results the EP800 is very linear but you haven't described the EP800 as a chest thumper. You've described it as "rippling bass".

So...what is more accurate? Rib cage rattling as a result of thumping or gonad tickling as a result of rippling? Both can't be accurate - it has to be one or the other.