Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Outlaws & Five M80's Conclusion (long post)

I will try to explain the Outlaw problem with my five M80's and QS8's, I do want to make it clear that I was very impessed with the 950/770 combo, and I do think it was perhaps just an issue on the 770 that I happened to get. Here is the problem, the left rear channel amp would go into thermo protection, within 20 minutes, it did not matter what type of sound was playing, or if it was in 5.1 or 6.1 or 7.1, the only factor that seems to cause it is the volume level.
When the 950/770 arrived, it was connected to the front M80's, VP150, QS8's, the system was used daily, with differant listening levles, but mostly at the - 20 db on the 950 display. The 950/700 was stacked, but it was on the marble tile floor, no pad or carpet under the 770, and it was in that position for almost a week as I changed and tweaked with cables and other things. The Outlaws performed flawlessly, and I was a very happy camper with them.
Since 770 was making the M80's sound great, I decided to go ahead and push the budget and add the M80's for the rear channel, this was always in the plan, but not for a few months because of budget. So I emailed Amie and asked her to send another pair of the M80's to add to the family, as ususal within 4 days they arrived, as soon as they were in the door, I put them in place, ran temporary wires to them, I also had ordered 300' of the Axiom 12 ga speaker wire, as I had been using 14 ga on the old speaker system, and becasue of the lenght of runs for the rears, I now had 195' of new wires to pull through the 12" high floor space of the second floor for the rear M80's and the QS8's.
So with new wiring laying on the floor to all 7 speakers, I fired up the Outlaws, and proceded to realx and listen to the new speaker addition, volume at the usual -20 db, the heck with the wire mess, just wanted to listen to tuns. By this time, my roomies were home, and well haiving dinner, watched a few movies and the system was working great.
The next morning I set about to run the new wires, had the system on and since it was sounding great, turned the volume up, set it at -15, and went to work on the wires. Well.....about 20 minutes later, I hear a pop out of the left rear M80, turend the volume down and went to investigate, no longer a happy camper, my less than 24 hour brand new M80 is dead, no sound at all..........panic time, I runs to call for help......Axiom, on phone, hearing they never have an M80 die.
Well talking to Joe, I'm madly checking wiring, connections, and then I hear another pop, wow, the M80 is reborn. Happily say bye to Joe, turn the volume back up, off to works I go. Well.......20 minutes later, pop, no more M80 once again, this time I wake up and figure its the amp, do a test tone, and sure enough, no left rear amp, so I think okay, maybe with the addion of the rear speakers, the amp is wanting more cooling, shut the system down, put the 950 and the 770 back to back on the floor, and when the thermo protector pops back alive, re-power the system and go back to wiring. I was expecting some calls, so was just ruinning at the -20 db level.
That evening when roomies get home, they are anxious to hear the new speaker addition, run the volume up to the -15 db, now three happy campers, but only for about 20 minutes, can hear that now to fermiliar pop, left rear amp cuts out once again.......to late to call Outlaw, eat, go to bed not happy at all.
Next morning on the phone at 6am (PST) to talk to a tech, talk to Scott, he tells me the 770 is bullet proof, has never had a 770 thermo protector kick in, insists it has to be one of the new M80's are defective, wants me to talk to Axiom. Off the phone, and I call, lines busy, left a message. As I was out running errands, roomie gets a call and when I return, he hands me a number and says some one named Alan called, I stare at him and why he did not transfer the call to my cell. <g> Not all a bad thing, now I have Alans direct number, I call Alan and have a long chat with him, and he assures me M80's don't arrive defective, some where in here I had already changed speakers out, exchanged the left rear with a front M80, and the problem was still happening.
It was getting close to the weekend, had about 20 friends shwoing up for an auditioning party, spent the next few days concealing wires and putting the system back together. Also had ordered another M80 to replace the VP150. Party went well, lots of comments on the Axioms, and just kept the volume at - 20db and above, no problems at all.
Some time the following week the M80 arrives, I take down the VP150, and set the M80 in its new home, fire up the Outlaws, set the volume at - 20 db, and give a listen to the great sound of the new center channel, after an hour or so, increase the volume to -18, to avoid that -15 problem..........20 minutes later, I loose the left rear channel again, this just suks, on the phone to Outlaw, this time talking to Steve, explain the whole ting in detail, he tells me the 770 is bullet proof, they have never heard of a thermo protector kicking in, it has to be my M80's and wires, could I change speakers out, try all of them in the left rear position, check wires, was I using banana plugs, if not, install them to assure no shorts.....come on tech, give me some credit, with a brand new $8k system, I'm sure not going to be so careless as to not make sure when connecting speaker wire not to caue a ground....but okay, I will do as you ask.
Off to Best Buy, waste $ 74 on 28 AR banana plugs, spend the time to install all of them, use Fluke meter one again to check all of my 300' of wire. Fire up the system, set the volume to the by now hated - 15 level, wait 20 minutes........yup, there goes the left rear channel, do this for the next 100 minutes, changing out the M80 every time the channel cuts out.
After a few days of trying differant speaker/wire locations, call Steve back, this time he wants be to put the 950-770 back to back, and change out the seven Outlaw interconnects, to see if one of them is defective. Keep in mind, each test take 20 minutes, even got to the point of using a stop watch I have, and it was within a minute or so of taking 20 minutes for the thermo to kick in every time.
Call back and talk to Steve again reporting that the interconnects were not the issue, and also now that I had added the M80 for a center channel, the thermo was kicking in not at the - 15 level, but now as high as - 18, so from what I was seeing, the probelm was getting worse, not better. This was the wrong thing to point out, becasue he then wants to know if I have talked to Axiom to see if the M80 could be increasing a way to much form the 4 ohm rating, and thus, my five M80's were maxing out the 300 watts x 7@ 4 ohm rating. So I had another long chat with Alan, and this is when I decided to start doing some testing with the only tool I had, the Fluke multimeter.
I did days of testing with the meter, put every one of the seven speakers on the problem channel, no matter which speaker was connected to the problem channel, it always cut out within the 20 minutes, even the center M80 that only has a 3' length of 12 ga wire. More conversations with Steve, re-doing things he had already had me do in the past weeks, and constantly resorting back to the M80's and speaker wire lenghts. So this week he decided to call the factory to see if they had any clue as to waht was happening and said he would call back.
So that aftenoon/evening after talking to him and Alan once again, I decided to just run temp wires on the floor, moved the rear speakers so they were only 18 feet from the amp, now all 7 speakers had less than 1' of 12 ga, set the level at -15 and ran a test cd for 48 mins, once again, the left rear channel drops out at 20 minutes. Well doing this test, I decdied to try one thing I had not done, since the problem channel amp is in the center of the 770, switched in interconnets around and speaker wires so the the QS8' were on the two inboard amps, tand the rear M80's were now on the out board channles. My logic was that if the M80's were causing the heating problem, the QS8's would not be working the center amps as hard.
This timne I thought I had soved the issue when it got to the 33 minute time, no channel drop out...YEA ! OOPS, at 34 minutes, I not only lost the usual left rear, but also lost, right rear, right front, and center.....I give up, becaue now it seems all I did was distriubte the heat gain more even and cause more thermo protectors to kick in. Wnet to bed and wait to see what Steve has to say the next day.
Next morning well waiting for a call, realized I had not done one test yet, since Steves main thought was at this point that I was simply over driving the amp, decided to use the meter, and test the left rear speaker and see what the watts were when it cut out. Ran music for 48 mins, at the - 15 dp, and when the left channel cut out, the peak wattage was 92.16, and the average wattage for that 48 mins was 7.562. I then spent the next few hours measuring the other six spekaers and added up the total wattage being used by all seven speakers when the thermo kicked in, it was a big total of 476.31 watts, out of the 300x7 @ 4 ohms that the 770 produces.
When Steve did call, he was unable to talk to the factory, and was going to call me back the next day, I informed him of the latest tests, and that I was not happy with this after trouble shooing for over three weeks, and asked even if I waitited till he talked to the factory, what good would it do, I could not repair the 770 here, it would still need to be shipped back to Outlaw Steve then asks if I was saying that I did not want the 770 returned after it was repaired ??
I kindly reminded him of the 30 day gurantee and that I was not happy at this point, and would just prefer to send both the 950/770 back, and let them find out exactly what is going on, and that I was not upset, or have bad feelings about Outlaw products, I think I just get a defective 770, which can happen with any barnd, I have had it before, no big deal. He agreed to my retning them, and aked for a week or two for them to find the problem and contact me. So they will be boxed up as soon as I receive the return tags, Im'm not thrilled about the problems, as I will most likely invest a lot more to replace them, but at this point, I don't think I want to try another 770. So for now, back to research, and I still have my old Sony STR-DE935 and it wll handle equipment and the 5.1 for now. <g>

Very interesting post. Thanks.
Maybe you should have given Steve, Alans number, or tried 3 way calling.

Ya, may have taken less time. But I feel like I took up to much of Alans time the way it was, this was not an Axiom related problem at all, but as usual, Axiom has went out of thier way once again for me and its very much appreciated.

Sorry to hear about all the problems you have had. Considering that I am an Axiom/Outlaw user, I found your post very interesting. During this whole mess, did Outlaw ever offer to send a replacement 770 to see if your problem was a defective unit? Hopefully, their repair folks can figure out what the issue was. Please, keep us posted on your findings.

Good luck,

David

No, that is what rather upset me, Steve never offered to send a replacement, and yesterday he mentioned the reason why, it was beacuse he was concered that if he sent a replacement and I had the same issue, it would just be more time and cost involved.

I had a feak thing with the EP600 a few weeks after haivng it, it blew a fuse or two, after the second blown fuse, I was told by Joe at Axiom, if it happened again, not to replace the fuse, to call him and a replacement EP600 would be out the door the next day. Thats been about 3 weeks ago and have had no more problems, but this is the kind of support I expected from Outlaw, so I was a bit disappointed when I did not get it. ;-)

I do understand that techs need to try and eliminate any user caused issues, and that is why I tried and did all of the trouble shooting they requested., as I stated, no ill feelings, was just a problem, not the first, and sure not the last. ;-)

Damn! That's too bad. I have an Outlaw M200 that I use for my VP150 center channel speaker and it works flawlessly. Its even gotta keep up with a B&K Reference 2220 and has no problem doing it at all. I agree that Outlaw amps are great, but I don't know about "bulletproof!" Bulletproof to me is Krell, McIntosh, B&K Reference Series, Sunfire, Bryston, Aragon, and the like.

Monoblocks, yes........I have read nothing but great things about them, that was my suggestion to Steve about two weeks ago, I wanted to exchange the 770 for seven of the mono's, they have a group price for 7, not much more than the cost of the 770, which I would have gladly paid, but as I stated in a post on another thread, Steve was very hesitant to do that till the 770 heat issue was resolved. *confused me*

Now that's odd. I consider Outlaws CS on par with Axioms. I hope it isn't a sign of things to come. Anyway, have you decided on another brand?

I doubt if this is normal for Outlaw, kinda think that this was a freak accurance, and they were just trying nail down the casue, at least that is what I hope.

At any rate, another choice, ya, Anthem, Parasound, and thanks to a few nameless people here <g> Sunfire, and now Aragon which I had spaced out for a time. Needs are 300 wattsx7 continous, and a processor/controller, don't care if it has fm/am or not, never use it.

I too, have heard nothing but praise for Outlaw's CS. However, I have never had a problem so I have no personal experience. Although, having dealt with Axiom on a tweeter and woofer issue in one of my M22s, it is hard to imagine anybody on the planet offering better CS than Axiom. Although...praise for Axiom CS...that is old news around these parts.