Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Real wood satin issues

Just for clarification, when you chose a "real wood finish", are you actually buying that type of wood or is it a higher grade of fiber board or some type of oak with vinyl wrap?

You can no longer choose vinyl or wood. You always get a wood finish. Ian made it so because the difference in cost between wood and vinyl was quite close. Good call I say for many reasons. Right now we don't know which refurb products have woodies but maybe Axiom will improve on that.

The box is always made from the same material which I suspect is low weight HDF. A thin veneer of a choice of wood and finish is adhered to the wood.

From the bit of research I've done, low weight HDF is more expensive than HDF. Way more expensive.

Building speakers out of wood is very expensive for many reasons besides the cost of wood. The final product is not necessarily superior to MDF or HDF unless it has been carefully acoustically characterized and resonances have been reduced to an inaudible level.

I am very satisfied with the robustness of the HDF and the level of bracing in v4. Axiom has really upped its game.

You all know I like v4, right? Axiom kept the damned v4 secret for way too long and so did its customers. It's like they wanted to keep it all to themselves.

I conducted a very scientific experiment on the walnut natural satin durability.

I prepared my cappuccino in my favourite cup gifted to me by the lovely barista I helped one day. The bottom of this cup has a Mohs hardness of 7. The bottom was 78C and was circumscribed by 0.5 mL of water moisture. I slid it across the walnut at an acceleration of 1 ft/sec^2. I left it on there for 5 mins. I then removed it and wiped the moisture. I saw no visible change in the walnut.

Photos below. All very scientific-like. I let my cap get cold in the name of science!

I declare this walnut natural satin pretty darned solid. We'll see how solid the future subs are.

The cases are made from sheet fiber board. It has wood veneer on one side. They use a CNC router table type machine that cuts groves into the back side of the sheets. They are then folded, using glue to make the joints solid. This technique allows for a continuous wood "wrap" around the corners. It looks better than cutting veneer and joining at the edges. I've tried to re-cover older Axiom speakers with wood veneer, they turned out OK, but not as good as the Axiom wood speakers.

A speaker case made from any type of solid hardwood, would be inferior to a case built with fiber board. At least from a density / rigidity perspective.

Try that with a glass of ice water ...

I started this thread because of what I was observing moving the speakers around. In one instance the bottom of an M3 lightly bumped into the side my EP600 as I was moving it and left a very shallow indent. Normally this would not be a problem but the finish and veneer is so thin and/or the material below it compresses easier then I'd expect. Just struck me that I needed to be more careful than I usually would with typical finished wood stuff. The next observation came when I must have picked up a grain of dirt on the bottom of an M3 and placed it on top of another M3. When I moved it off I slid it and it left a nice scratch down to the wood or even the base material. Think it would disappear with a bit of teak oil but one has to wonder if the finish was harder if it would have scratched at all.

I'll try the glass of ice water stunt on the new subs that are coming.

I don't understand though why you are lightly bumping an M3 against a 600. And why would you pick up a grain of dirt with the bottom of an M3, place the whole sordid assembly on top of another M3 and then slide it to materialize a scratch? And if the scratch was nice, why are you complaining?

Well, I guess I’m just a clumsy oaf
It just seemed to me that these speaker are a bit more fragile then I expected.
But now that I know I’m taking more care.
I’m not stacking speaker on each other anymore without some sort of protection between them.

(also there is more grime around since the HT is not finished ... which doesn’t help)

Hope to see lots of pics of your HT room when your finished Rlev, whats your timeline for completion?

like to be done by the end of winter but there is no real time line

When I looked back through the gallery I was super pumped to order high gloss piano finished speakers. Either the finisher they had before has moved on or they use a new product. Definitely not what I was expecting and wouldn’t pay the premium again.

That said, I have now sold 2 sets of M5s to others and expect many more. Very very nice performing speakers and a joy to demo. A bargain.