Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Energy vs Axiom: Surrounds

Okay, I have a slight dilemna, and I thought I'd post here to see if anyone has some advice. I've finally gotten around to finishing my home theatre setup by getting surround speakers, completing a 5.1 setup. I used to just use a cheapo pair of speakers I borrowed from a friend, but for the last year or so I've only had 3.1 (M50's, VP100, HSU VTF-2). So I had planned to just buy a pair of booksheves used as surrounds, as $$$ constarints mean I'm looking at used, and I know I'd rather use bookshelves as rears, both because I like the more direct sound, and qs4 and qs8's seem to be out of the price range even at used prices. So I've been looking at either M2's or M3's to use as rears. I know the drivers of the M3's match my M50's, but I'm not too concerned that the M2's won't sound anything but almost identical. However, while recently in a local audio shop, I see that they're clearing out some Energy speakers, and have Encore 2 surrounds at (what the dealer said) as being half price (about 230cdn plus tax). So I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with these speakers? At this price point are they worth buying over used M3's or M2's which seem to be about the same price on the used market? Should there be any concern about matching with my fronts? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

I just replaced my no-name surrounds with M2s to get a timbral match with the M60/VP100. Didn't notice a huge change with movies but the improvement with music was night and day. The first thing I noticed was that the differences between surround modes (PLII, Logic7, Neo6 etc..) seemed to be much less than before -- every mode used to sound completely different which really bugged me -- and all of a sudden the 5.1 modes sounded MUCH better than "surround off" even though the fronts hadn't changed.

IMO for movies unmatched surrounds are probably OK but if you do a lot of music listening it's worth getting an exact match, even to the extend of getting M3s over M2s. Otherwise you risk ending up in the same situation I had, where I had to turn off the surrounds when listening to music.