Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo M2 vs M3 vs M5 a very quick unscientific eval

Mojo, what environment do you have your M2 on walls? Surrounds? Crossed over at what frequency?

Stereo, no cross-over. Left and right crappy subs are set to 80Hz. Soon to be replaced with two EP125s. Wall-to-wall soundstage and very deep.

ok, so what is the deal with all the edged weapons? lol

Let me guess. You use fishing line and bait to catch fish. I like to give them a fighting chance by using my Spetznaz shovel.

This was one of the items which arrived with no damage (at least to the enclosure). It sounds more like the crossover is out of spec ... the FFT is fairly close to what the others are giving me ... but anything is possible. I'll test it some more if I can just find where my splitter cables are. I'm so disorganized.

Just recognize that a slight shift between the position of units could change the FFT even if you are using tight gating.

Ok, spent a bit of time figuring out how to take a frequency response ... not sure I've got it 100% but I've measured it well enough.

So, Which M3 is not like the others?


All these speakers are M3v4's. The green line is my 2016 M3. The others are 2020 M3s.
If you guess the M3 in red was the one in my original write-up (#438551) then you guessed right. Leave it to Murphy that I grab the only dud M3 in the bunch (but then again I might not have found it otherwise).

Now before you start reading too much into my measured reponses there are a few things you need to know:
It was taken with pink noise, in a fairly lively room and using my iPads internal mic ... so it's far from a perfect measurement (i.e. don't compare it the axioms anechoic response). What it does do, is enable us to compare similar speakers relative to each other ... and we can clearly see that red's mids, upper mids, and the lower highs are down quite a bit. This is where vocals and a lot of instruments reside. In any case depending on where you place your listening viewpoint you could look at it as recessed mids & highs or bloated bass.

I'm thinking (guessing) that the drop off at the high end may be related the pink noise energy dropping below the limits of what the system can evaluate (starting around 7khz). That said we can still see that the 2016 M3 has a slight high-end bump. I'll have to test the other 2016 M3 to say for sure but when I was comparing these the 2016 M3 always sounded slightly better to me ... I'm wondering if this was why.

Rlev, do you have a pic of your listening space?

My ears have heard the new tweeters perform at a lower, high level, if that makes sense. I enjoy the older tweeters over the new ones, as my ears are a custom to their overly bright sound, but thats a personal opinion and subject to the listener. Ian has informed me that he has a few old tweeters laying around that he can ship out upon request.

Keep going. Maybe I ought to send you mine for a sweep.

Was there a change in the V4 tweeter over this time frame?