Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Triggered pulled - Active LFR-1100's are on order!

Yeah, flames, smoke.

So, I was listening to the SACD, The Power of the Orchestra - Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, Night on Bare Mountain, Antique Sound Labs integrated SET tube amp, Sony DVP9000ES disc player, 2 Michaura M66s (2 x 6.5" Axiom drivers, 1 x 3/4" titanium tweeter from the Merak line of speakers made by Axiom) and 2 Dahlquist 15" subwoofers (1 speaker atop each sub)

Anyway, the music was FANTASTIC, I was peaking, utterly transported between this realm and the upper regions as only music can do, when I smelled something wrong.

White smoke was pouring out of the port of one of the Dahlquist 15" subs. Lots of smoke. Stinky smoke.

I quickly disconnected the sub, picked it up (heavy) and ran out the side door, put it down and hit the port up with my fire extinguisher.

What ever happened to clean CO2 extinguishers? You wouldn't believe the mess this extinguisher made.

I will say, that immediately prior to the fiery death of that sub, I had never heard Mussorgsky sound so good. I suppose the event would have been more appropriate playing Wagner.

I look forward to your review of the kit components! Your reviews are always great Mr. Craigsub!

"Anyway, the music was FANTASTIC, I was peaking, utterly transported between this realm and the upper regions as only music can do..."

Careful. Mike will come after you.

The Emotiva XMC-1 has shipped, along with the XLR cables. Getting new toys is ALWAYS fun!

The Emotiva arrived, so I took a couple of hours yesterday, and tore the system down, and rewired with the XLR cables.

The XLR's have dropped the noise floor to the point where one needs to put one's ears about 3 inches from the tweeters to hear anything - and then it's a very faint hiss.

The lower noise floor has brought the dynamics out even further, with a more solid imaging on instruments and vocals.

Right now, this is still with the Marantz 7703 still in the system, along with the Yamaha CD-2100 SACD/CD player and 10 channels of ADA-1500 amplifiers.

The Marantz was left in for now, as I like to swap one thing at a time into the system. The Emotiva will go in either later today or next weekend, and experiments will start with Dirac Live.

Can't wait to hear your thoughts on comparison. Being they are both such well regarded processors.

Is the Emotiva one of the newer ones with 16 or more channels? A lot of the youtube reviewers have been waiting for them ti implement Dirac since release.

Last night, I actually had a spare hour to do some listening to a "Masters of Acoustic Guitar" speaker. SO - for a interesting test that was inspired after watching a video on the $30,000 per pair Magnepan 30.7's - I walked around the room including to the sides and behind the speakers.

No matter where you went, it sounded like a guy was playing the guitar in the room. It was slightly less palpable behind the speakers, as one would expect when walking behind the guy playing guitar.

If you read between the lines in Ian's posts on the LFR-1100 Actives, he will often say "we are onto something here."

They are onto something here, and the science is getting noticed in a LOT of places. Floyd Toole developed the idea, and companies are taking it to heart in flagship speakers.

In 40 years of a hobbyist, I have seen countless times where speaker and amplifier companies touted a "live - you are there" sound. The technology today is getting us closer to that happening all the time.

Where Axiom has an edge is there are NO layers between the consumer and manufacturer. At the normal "I can wait 21 days" pricing, a full system with dual EP800's, 10 channels of ADA-1500, and the LFR-1100 actives are $19530.

Add this to the often used additional deals, and one can get down to close to $15 or $16K.

This is shipped to one's door, for a system flat to 12 Hz. Dynamics galore. A neutral sound that just present music without a hint of harshness at any listening level.

Music is here, and this is fantastic.

Exciting stuff! Do you think it would be possible to obtain similar results from a smaller pair of active omnidirectional speakers in a smaller space? Active LFR660s? Or an active omnidirectional version of an M5? Hoping we'll eventually see these breakthroughs trickle down to the rest of the lineup.

An active 660 with a pair of ADA-1000-5's could be a tremendous value. The only issue might be this: The LFR-660 passive is $2120 less than the LFR-1100 passive.

If this correlated over to the Active side, the Active 660 would only be about 20 percent less total dollars than the 1100 with the ADA-1000-5's.

If one "package price" is about $9000 and the other is about $11000 … is there enough savings versus performance?

Andrew and Ian can wrestle this idea.

I’m sold sign me up!!

You inspired a snoop around on Axiom's main site. They have a package with the 660's that includes a pre-amp, DSP and ADA-1000-4 in one package.

The "I can wait" price is a bit under $4000 - and Axiom offers other specials, too.

As we already have an ADA-1000-5 here, I am going to check with Ian about doing a comparative review of this $3900 package to the $16,000 active 1100 package.