Came home Friday to find my Axiom factory outlet order had arrived. Again, as with the first order, a projected 5 week wait was less than 2 weeks. I got one additional M80, two M22s, and two QS8s with stands. All speakers were in perfect condition, I couldn’t find one blemish on any of them. The boxes were even unscathed, however not to sure about the no signature thing FedEx does.

I plan on trying several different configurations based on what others have posted here, and I'm open to suggestions on other things to try. So far I’ve only done some preliminary tests none of them are A/B comparisons since the order arrived before I could pick up a switch. Here’s what I plan to try and some preliminary observations.

M80 center sitting in front of the TV even with the mains. Awesome! Dynamic and seamless soundstage across the front. May even sound better when sitting in the sweet spot than a phantom center with M80s.

M80 center upside down above the TV. Almost as good as above just as dynamic but may not be as seamless. However, the vertical expansion of the front soundstage seems intriguing for movies. Massively better than a single VP150 above the TV.

M22 dual centers above and below the TV. Not as dynamic as the M80s but very big soundstage centered on the TV both horizontally and vertically.

M22 dual centers laying horizontally above the TV with tweeters in the middle. Can you say lobing. Not noticeable in the sweet spots but just move my head a little and there’s different SPLs at each ear. Feels very strange but does confirm that I never noticed any lobing with the VP150. I need to play with the distances between the speakers because when in a sweat spot the “wall of sound” coming from this configuration sounds very interesting with movies but I can already tell I don’t like it for music.

QS8s as surround back speakers. (I have only DD-EX and DTS-ES sources) with EX and ES sources rear soundstage sounds fuller and blends better with the front probably due to moving the surround L/R forward some. Not noticing any change with vanilla 5.1 sources but still have much experimenting to do.

M22s as surround back speakers. Haven’t tried it yet.

Back to playing with my new toys now that I have a switch to do some A/B comparisons.

Cheers,
Dean

Hey Dean, thanks for the info! That's really cool stuff--sounds like you're having a good time, too.

But... how the heck did you get the M80 upside down above the TV?

Simple answer…no W.A.F.

More precisely, my apartment lease doesn’t allow anything nailed to the walls so when I made my theater I built a frame to hang curtains from around the inside of the entire room including a façade even with the front of the TV. Part of that façade includes a shelf originally for my VP150. Not only did I overbuild it a little bit as luck would have it there is just enough room for a M80 to sit vertically on the shelf above the TV. Also didn’t hurt that I spent 10 years seriously into power lifting before I got back into running recently.

The vertical separation between the tweeters on the L/R main M80s and the center M80 is just over one and a half feet, almost the same as it was for the VP150.

That... explains everything. I'd still love to see a picture of that, though.

Very good, Dean; that's certainly quite a bit for just "preliminary tests"! Not my favorite configuration, but one other that you might check would be vertical M22 centers immediately at the left and right edges of the screen.

On using the QS8s as back surrounds, of course you can apply DPLIIx to both 2 and 5 channel source materials to give the back surrounds some work.

Instant qualification for the ManPoint card Platinum if you leave it in that configuration.

I’ll take a picture as soon as I borrow a digital camera from someone at work. Or maybe I’ll just admit it’s the 21st century and buy one.

Thanks for mentioning the sides of the screen John. Originally I hadn’t considered it since my mains are very close to the edges already and I figured it would be just like a phantom center, however I could separately control the volume of the center that way which was my biggest beef with running a phantom center using the mains.

I must say that I am very impressed with the M22s. At the lower volumes I’ve been listening at so far I think they may on a price vs performance basis be better than the M80s. I’ll have to also try them as mains teamed up with the EP500.

I’m starting to notice that the DPLllx is doing more than I realized. So far it seems to be very source dependent. I was watching parts of some “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episodes and listening to one scene in the Bronze it sounded like I was really in a bar with the characters. And those DVDs are only Dolby Surround.

Have a great time with your experimentation.

Your *apartment* lease??!! Holy crap, your config sounds like the ultimate lease-breaker

What fun!

Sadly I do have to keep the volume turned down which is why I haven’t bothered to buy any separate amps. I’m off work every other Monday when no one else is around so I do get to have some real fun then, especially now that the kids are back in school. However, while music does sound better a little louder especially classical I find that movies have a better 360 degree sound stage when played at low to moderate volumes in my room.

That's EXACTLY what kept coming up in my mind as I read down this post.

Sounds really cool though. I will second the nomination for Man Card upgrade.

Hmm... Thats the effect of DPLIIX and the rear surrounds?

Having experienced it a few times now I just love that 3 dimensional effect. It really pulls me into the movie.

Hmm...


Buy one. My brother just picked up a 10mpixel slr with a couple of lenses for a grand. The pictures are almost indistinguishable from film. I was quite surprised how much I could zoom in on his images on my 50" 1920x1080 display before it started to pixelate.

How well it expands the surround sound seems very dependent on the source to me. I have also noticed that I prefer the DPLIIx “music” mode more than the “cinema/movie” mode even when watching movies. It seems to expand and enhance the surround sound the most. I have yet to play around with any of the optional parameters.

So far my opinion of DPLIIx is that it does either enhance or at least not degrade the movies I’ve tried it on. However, using it on music is more of a mixed bag for me. On well made stereo recordings I think it makes them sound worse. The soundstage seems to get blended together losing the positioning of instruments and singers. There also seems to be a dynamic loss, not sure if it’s really compression or some other byproduct of the digital processing. I think it does improve the sound of poorly recorded stereo music. The expansion of the soundstage seems to outweigh whatever other processing artifacts it introduces.

Dean, what DPLIIx and the other similar ambience extraction modes do is to remove out-of-phase sound(representing reflections from directions other than the front)from the front channels in stereo material and steer it to the appropriate surrounds. The effect varies with the amount of surround ambience that has been mixed in to the front channels(the Dimension control can adjust for this to some extent)but I've found that it improves nearly all of my classical CDs and I always use it.

One experiment that might interest you is to disconnect all speakers except the mains, but still show them on your receiver, and then apply DPLIIx to hear the effect on the mains alone of the material being extracted.

Thanks for the information. I never read up on it and just thought DPLIIx just pulled out certain frequencies.

That test sounds like a really cool idea. Hmmm….I might feel a sick day coming on here.

Better late than never but here’s some pictures.



Yes you can put an M80 upside down above your TV, and can I say it totally rocks. No more puny center channel speakers here (said with a heavy Austrian accent). Normally I leave the grills on but they wouldn’t have shown up in the picture that way.



Three of the four QS8s. Curtains are open or you wouldn’t be able to see them either. Still playing with the setup of these. Probably be awhile before I settle on their configuration.



This is the equipment and media storage area. The curtains also close here to completely blackout the walls in the viewing area. I’ve found that the ceiling and carpet don’t reflect enough light to be visible from my seating area which is usually lounging on pillows on the futon.

My next project if I renew my lease and find the energy to move all that crap is to build a false wall extending out from the kitchen wall to fully enclose the viewing area. It will make the viewing room 12 x 19.5 feet the current viewing area. However the full room is 19.5 x 19.5 (not good). Adding a false wall will also give an extra layer of insulation from the very noisy HVAC system.

There are 3 computers there Linux Red Hat/Free BSD (dual boot), Debian/XP (dual boot), and Vista (sometimes boot). The HDTV is hooked to all three with a KVM switch. The far monitor is hooked up to the Vista box to monitor DVD/CD rips.

On the equipment rack (metal storage rack from Home Labyrinth) from bottom to top is:

cheepo Wally World TV for normal normal viewing, VHS to DVD recorder, Denon 2807, Buttkicker Amp, Xbox 360 Elite ,4way speaker switch, DSL modem, Linksys router, D-link network switch, Opo 981 DVD player, Monoprice HDMI switch, Direct TV HD DVR, Promise network attached storage device.

In the three media racks (out of space again) there are about 1500 DVDs 100 CDs 20 Xbox games and 10 computer games.

More comments on the various speaker configurations later. I’ve been experimenting a lot but haven’t had a chance to post since much of this weekend was spent in Microshaft Vista hell.




It’s staying right were it is unless I upgrade to a projector and screen, in which case I swap the positions of the TV and speaker) or there is an earthquake.

Cool pics.

M22 mains +EP500 subwoofer. These little things totally blow me away. I can barely tell the difference between the M22s+EP500 and the M80s+EP500 all crossed over at 80Hz. The only difference was that the M80s sounded a little “fuller” on some things like male vocals and bass guitar, but if I wasn’t A/B comparing them I don’t think I would have noticed the difference. However, my friend Fred (a part time audio engineer) could tell them apart instantly every time. We both felt the M80s sounded better at the lower end while the M22s sounded better from the mid to higher end.

With pop and rock music the M80s+sub sounded a little, I mean little better. For movies I couldn’t tell the difference when both were crossed over at 80Hz. However, when the M80s were crossed over at 60Hz they took command of the front soundstage during action scenes. While you may not be able to hear the direction of sounds below 80Hz you sure can feel them in the real world and I sit close enough to my M80s to feel the cannon blasts coming from each side of the screen in “Master and Commander” or the Balrog’s breath in LOTR FOTR.

The one place I think the M22s+sub beat out the M80s+sub was with classical music. The M22s just sounded more detailed and accurate.

95dB was the loudest I listened and usually it was around 75dB but got the feeling that in a larger room the M80s would have come out a little stronger over the M22s than they did here.

When I A/B tested them I put the M22s upside down on top of the M80s. One of the first things I noticed was that they had a wider more enveloping sound field than the M80s. To make sure it wasn’t the higher placement I moved the M80s each up a foot and noticed the same thing with them. This puts the tweeters just a little higher than ear level but it sounds better. Not sure why they sound more spacious higher up but for now they are staying on the milk crates until I grab a couple cinder blocks from my dad.

M80 center upside down above the TV. After moving my mains up a foot (their tweeters are still about 1/2 foot below the center) and angling the center M80 down I now feel that this configuration sounds better than all 3 M80s upright on the same level. Not sure it sounds as natural but better.

For movies the “wall of sound” this makes is captivating. However it never draws my attention up above the screen the way the single VP150 sometimes did, and pans are seamless. Music sounds like it’s coming from a stage and I’m sitting in one of the front rows. Classical concerts definitely sound better this way but I’m still not sure about other genres with discretely placed musicians and singers.

So for now the front will consist of 2 M80 mains about 1 foot off the ground and 1 M80 center upside down above the TV all crossed over at 60Hz and angled slight in.

More listening to do for the single/dual M22 centers and M22 rears before posting about them.

I just have to repeat how impressed I am with the M22s + EP500. I think it gives me about 95%+ of what the M80s +EP500 do in my medium size room at moderate volumes. On a pure bang-for-the-buck analysis I think it would be hard to beat the M22s +sub. One of these days I’d like to take my M80s into a big room and hook them up to a powerful amp to see what they can really do.

Thanks for posting your thoughts on your experiment. I agree with pretty much everything you said, in my small/medium size rooms the M22s work great even with out a sub. But having taken the M22s to Mojo's 4000cf room, they couldn't keep up to the M80s and they sounded much thinner in his spacious, open room. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the M22s/sub in a bigger room, just to see if they are similar to my findings as well.

Thanks for the posts on your experimentation.

Interesting observations on the M22s. I actually found it the other way around with the M80 showing a little more detail even on the high end.

Where you listening to them at the Axiom site? I got the feeling that the M80s would sound much better than the M22s in all ways in a bigger room and played louder. I suspected as much when I was buying speakers but wanted to future proof myself and just went with the M80s.

Yes. but it wasn't that large a room; 20x12x8.

Interesting! That is the size of my listening area but the overall room is 20x20x8. Did they have any room treatments? I know I need them badly but just haven’t gotten around to making anything as I keep telling myself that I should buy a house. I imaging I could make the stuff so it’s usable in most any room.

No treatments that I remember, but I wasn't really looking for anything like that at the time.

The room was a 'working' sound room meaning that it was not meant as a show room. As I remember, the inside walls were not covered, so you could see the 2x4 framing and there was lots of other stuff in the room. There could well have been damping material between the studs and I would not have noticed. It was not a lively room.

At the time, their new sound room was a pile of lumber in a corner of the plant.