Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Talk me out of it….Pulling the trigger…

Heads up you cannot reliably A/B test in a room unless the speakers are in the same location. Its an annoying trait of small room acoustics.

Moving the M3s to the same spot as the M60s is needed. Thats why harman has the speaker shuffler mechanism in their setup. Setting speakers beside eachother changes their loading and interaction with the room. The center to center distance of the front baffles is enough to have drastic results in small rooms. At least reverse the speaker positions and test again.

Moving M5s in my room 14 inches changed them from unlistenable to superlative. Food for thought.

Provided the speakers under test have "similar" radiation characteristics, I agree with putting them in the same position. I don't know if the radiation characteristics between ti and v4 are similar enough. While they sound different, the defining characteristics may be close enough that they do need to be in the same position.

What do you guys think about needing to re-calibrate the receiver for each speaker? (Which pretty much kills the utility of an A/B switch, you'd have to have two identical receivers.)

I remember auditioning Linn products in the late 1980's or early 1990's and their mentality was that you can only have the speakers that are being auditioned in the listening room - no other speakers.

It made it fun when we wanted to hear the 2 largest models they made...essentially the size of full sized refrigerators called the Isobariks or something like that!

Everything within a room affects response. The speaker, the room and everything in it, form a system.

There's a local high end audio dealer in town that used to throw great RSVP product demonstrations. I sat in the product launch of the Linn Klimax stereo loudspeaker around maybe 2004, and no one ever questioned the merit of stuffing 15 bodies into a non-air conditioned room at a time, nor the insanity of listening to a stereo pair where only those sitting in the center experienced any spatial qualities.

In hindsight, I prefer the sub-sat form factor for versatility, and audio listening through a 5.1 set-up for a wider sweet spot.