Took my new baby out into her natural habitat and put her through her paces. She sounded oh so sweet, and put out some serious decibels with nary a hint of distortion or other sonic problems. She was the Belle of the Ball, even more so than the potato gun (keep an eye out for that in the video. One of the little kiddos mentions it, calling it "the potato shooter" lol)









My only qualms are the interface and the local wifi hotspot functionality.

The speaker works amazing if you have a USB key hooked into one of the jacks (which I did, for the majority of my music). When used in this manner, the interface is relatively straight forward although the volume adjustment sucks heinously. There is no fine adjustment whatsoever, and I mentioned elsewhere how the volume seems to go up logarithmically vs linearly. Quiet until about "6" or "7" then goes through the roof by "8" or "9". This stuff can be worked out though by the programmers, I'm sure. The volume button on either side of the volume level bar do not function as fine adjustments. Especially on the small surface of an iPhone with man-sized fingers. At times the volume bar would become selected like it thought I was trying to copy and paste it, when I was just trying to move the volume lower or higher. Some big huge up and down buttons are needed, with much finer adjustment than presently.

What I also didn't like when playing via USB was that I wasn't able to use my phone's side volume control buttons to adjust the speaker volume. It had to be done via the interface, and the UI is very slow to load into, especially when you need to cut the volume ASAP (like when the parkies come along at midnight to tell you to turn the damned music off lol). To add even more confusion to the mix is when I delved into streaming iTunes to the speaker, the volume control is yet again in another location. A single over-reaching interface really needs to be made. Hopefully this problem can be rectified with Apple.

So this leads to my second problem. The unit's wifi. It still needs some work. I know many people don't care about the function allowing multiple people to drop songs into the music queue, but for me it's critical. Like I said right off the hop, these pictures were taken in this speaker's natural environment. I got it specifically to allow my friends to queue up their own music while we're out on the deck partying, or out camping and on the lake. We all have different music on our devices and it's important to me to be able to access it all. As it was, when streaming iTunes through my phone it would work sometimes or be a horrible mess cutting in and out constantly. Also, some people could not even connect to it. These things were both happening when standing right beside the speaker, so signal fall off was *not* the issue. Completely unacceptable.

All in all, I am extremely happy with my AxiomAir. It just sounds so good and has such significant volume. The 2 issues above can be remedied through the software, I'm sure. The hardware is seriously in the A+ department. So I leave you with this...

https://youtu.be/3zSXmTPNOIE
(sorry, I can't figure out how to embed the YouTube video right into this post)

I agree on all counts. The more I listen, the more impressed I am with the sound. I'm listening almost exclusively through a USB memory stick. Truth be told, I have all the music I really care about on the little 128GB sucker, and if I never used it with networking functions, I would still be happy.

Yes, the volume control needs to be redesigned. I'm confident that will happen in some way or another.

When listening to it, I feel as though it's so easy to see it as amazing, but there are some ergonomic issues that need to be (and can be!) addressed in future software releases.

Color me optimistic and suitably impressed!

I just received my AA today and I have to agree with Timmeh with respect to my initial impression of the sound quality. However it was a short impression as I had a lot of difficulty trying to stream Tidal to the AA.

Tidal is my main source of music and I was not able to get it to play via the WiFi which troubles me immensely. I had to resort to hard wiring in via the headphone out to analog in on the AA from my Galaxy Note 4. I will sit down with more time to spend and try and puzzle my way through but my impression is that I will not be able to stream directly from my Note 4 to the AA. Very bad news and most likely means a Craigslist sale in the near future.

Like Timmeh I want to be able to stream music from other people`s phones to the AA and virtually everyone I know uses Tidal to stream. This would be a definite negative if it is not possible.

I also had some of the volume control issues that Timmeh had with his use of the AA. When I had to resort to hard wiring and using the control knob on the AA my beefy fingers found it quite annoying and unnecessarily difficult to operate.

I will work on my issues and see if I can get the AA to be truly portable and useful for my purposes of an Android phone using Tidal HiFi streaming and let everyone know how I make out. Suggestions welcomed.

BubbleUPnP has Tidal integrated. This is what I use to stream Tidal and also music on my phone to my AxiomAirs and it works great.
We are currently working with Tidal to integrate their software with the AxiomAir so you will be able to stream right from the Axiomair user interface.

Steve

Hello Steve,

Thank you for the suggestion. That worked like a charm. It streams excellent and sounds fabulous on the AxiomAir. I can now wait patiently for the AA interface to be upgraded with this functionality.

James