Review of the M100 from enjoy the misic

This review flew over my head. I must be getting old.

The first speaker to come up on Google under "Carmel" has, according to the first website I found with a price, a $18,000.00 price tag.

http://ultraaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=99:yg-acoustics-carmel-loudspeakers&catid=37:full-length-reviews&Itemid=2

I didn't like the tone of the review(until the end), I am biased.

Overall a decent review and the writer is quite good at fence sitting.On one hand you could ask why would you put the M100 against a $18g set of speakers, on the other you have to wonder what else they should compare them to. I am no audiophile, I don't pick music apart in the same way the author does. I think given the price difference the M100 stood up pretty well. The only problem I have with the review is that the author somehow believes he can recall what taj mahal sounded like in a certain venue years ago, honestly. The author's electronics speak to his eccentricity as a whole. He believes wires etc affect the sound,and as such maybe the axioms required a different wire combination than what he was using. I still put this in the win column.

richard

In all honesty, I am actually quite impressed that this reviewer did a review comparing speakers in which there was an enormous difference in cost between the two and if I was the owner of this other speaker company(Carmel), I don't think I would be too pleased. One usually never sees this type of head to head comparison. I think even the reviewer was surprised at the outcome and that was despite his little quirks in what he liked and didn't like about the sound of either. As we all know, the reviewers of so-called high-end(high priced) products, with no exceptions, usually always justify the differences by the cost and speakers costing considerably less, in their mind, would just not match up. It is all essentially long term brainwashing. Reviews like this sort of throw a monkey wrench in to that idea and it is long overdue.

I dunno, but if I was looking to buy speakers and even if money was no object, after reading this review, I certainly would still have to question why it would be necessary to spend 18Gs on a pair of speakers when I could buy a pair of M100s even in a custom finish and get similar performance for a fraction of the price.

Edzachary. Speakers should be heard and not seen at the beginning of a review so the reviewer doesn't portray his beliefs/first impressions on to the speaker he is reviewing.

From reading his equipment list, it's apparent that this is a reviewer who's a believer in high-priced magic amplifiers, players and even pieces of connecting wire. It shouldn't be surprising that he claims to hear superiority in many respects when listening to a much higher-priced speaker under open(non-blind)listening conditions.

Such reports shouldn't be taken seriously when not done in blind listening sessions.

Seen that this guy in his review has the speakers 30 inches from the rear wall & using all rear port plugs...

what is your setup with the m100's? I have mine 10 inches from the rear walls and 6 inches from side walls, slightly toed in, 10 feet apart and haven't experimented with the port plugs yet.

YG makes speakers that are 2 meters tall and cost over $125k.

Why not compare it to the new PSB T2 for $3.4k?

Or how about lots of other <$12k speakers?

It's just dumb.

Please don't be impressed with anyone just because they can compose a complete sentence, have a few "vocab" words to throw about, and can easily make a 2500 word piece outta nothing by going into mind-numbing detail about instrumental nuances that may occur for 4 seconds out of an entire LP.

As soon as any audio review gets into the endless paragraphs that begin with, "...and then I listened to," I can only get so far, then I get tired.

We're not impressed with anyone else's "collection," nor do we generally trust most experts-at-anything who have such catholic tastes as to include everything from the Baroque through The Vaccines.

And if the banjo sounds "closed in," what does one sound like when it's "let out?"

Does this mean I should stop reading all of your posts?

::Running, ducking the Gangland snowballs::

The ones that really get me is when they give the catalogue info numbers , like im really going to go out and get that album ,sheesh.

I lost all respect for the reviewer not too far into the article after he initially described the Axioms as 'bass heavy' then went on to complain they were too harsh on certain tracks. Doesn't he know he just contradicted himself?

Would be very interesting if someone would do a side-by-side with Bryston's Mode T (Vs. the M100). And, if Bryston is going to start building their models with the new tweeter?

The review is hilarious. It's a good illustration of how difficult it is to describe something that's invisible, i.e., sound. It's also full of what I call "audiobabble" - words that seem to be describing something, but which in reality aren't.

For example - "Taj Mahal will sound better with a more refined upper frequency response, higher ultimate resolution and faster reflexes." Seriously? What does that even mean?

People have reflexes and I suppose you could argue that speakers have response times, but what difference does that make? It's not like a computer monitor where a slow response time causes visible blurring. Images have resolution and a low resolution image is easy to spot, but what does a "higher ultimate resolution" sound like?

If the sound pixels are smaller, they flow through your ear canal easier.

As usual guys, it is the techno babble(aka misplaced snobbery) that exists throughout the so-called "high end" community when they review products. Reading speaker reviews from these people is bad enough, reviews about esoteric expensive cables, especially those in which a one man operation and sometimes a friend of the reviewer has come up with a magic formula that supercedes all other designs and manufactures them in his basement. Now those reviews are even more of a riot.

I still remember the quote of the late, great Julian Hirsch who wrote regular articles in the former "Stereo Review" which I believe now is part of "Sound & Vision". He said "that any manufacturer with half decent engineering can produce a product to a given performance spec. when they have access to the best parts, unlimited materials and, in the end,be able to charge anything they want for it. The REAL quality engineering and manufacturing comes when a manufacturer can produce a product to the similar spec. and performance to the above, maintain quality, yet, charge a fraction of the price while still making a decent profit in the process".

Incidentally, after years and years of listening AND playing music, along with the usual ridiculous "audiospeak" much of which has been referred to already, I am still trying to figure out what "inner detail" means?

"Inner detail" comes from navel-gazing.

Hi,

Unfortunately, professional reviews are important for a product. I remember at the time that I owned an audio-video boutique when I was introducing a new product potential customers were always inquiring if the product had been professionnaly reviewed. The same question I often had to reply to over the phone at Axiom. The reviews create a buzz around and generate interest for a new product.

The challenge for a reviewer is conveying to the readers his impressions (which are highly subjective) of a product. The difficulty comes from the fact that he can't compare what he is hearing to the original creation. He can only compare it to what it sounded on another speaker model, most likely to his reference speaker. A reference speaker which met his personal taste and expectations; not necessarely neutral, uncoloured or accurate.

Another challenge for a reviewer is to find new ways of using words and expressions to deliver his message. He wants to be different and he has to satisfy both the reader and the editor.

Another observation that I made over the years is that the review is written in relation with the price of the product. Often the goal of the review is clearly to justify its ridiculous high price.

Axiom speakers are exceptionally neutral and accurate. So if a reviewer is questionning its bass and/or highs may be, just may be, he should take the opportunity to question and reevaluate the performance of his reference speaker and this time trying not to be influenced by its price.

A professionnal review is nothing more than the opinion of a person and its value is always far less than your own opinion !

Don't take this the wrong way but who exactly decides who the professionals are. There are lots of names I recognize from magazines who have been around since before the wheel, like alan or Kal Rubinson but what exactly are the required credential's. My decision to buy axiom was more forum based than anything else and I found axiom by searching for Canadian speaker manufacturers. FWIW I don't think there are any words that convey correctly how music sounds or affects different people.

Richard

I'm thinking I'll try this positioning.

"Often the goal of the review is to justify its ridiculously high price".

JC, the statement you made here just sums everything up beautifully. When you see a reviewer like this under discussion review a really expensive boutique esoteric piece of equipment, I can't recall EVER, a reviewer saying anything but that it was "state of the art and well worth the money"!

Even after the Lexicon fiasco of two or three years ago when they were caught taking an intact $400 Oppo chassis and putting it in to a $3600 Lexicon Blu-Ray player, they continued to come up with all sorts of excuses why it was worth all that extra money and that included some of the reviewers that, no doubt, took advertising money from them. The same thing happened recently when "SIM Audio" did that with a Denon chassis. Of course, theirs was many times the price of the Denon. It is the culture, these so-called "high-end" reviewers still cannot come to grips with the fact that audio excellence does not have to come at enormous expense.