I feel a bit embarrassed here.

I've always felt that my Axiom M60's (which I've had for maybe...3 years?) were somehow not performing quite the same. My right and left have always sounded different. The right sounding thinner and brighter, the left sounding fine and dandy to my ears.

The thing is, my left ear is better than my right, so I've always chalked it up to my hearing.

So anyway, tonight I'm chilling out with a few beers and feeling a bit bored, listening to music and again thinking "these speakers sound like they're poorly matched or something, but it's probably just my hearing".

Suddenly I remember I've always meant to switch the left and right to see if it IS just my hearing.

Now the right side sounds better to me. The left now sounds thinner and brighter. So I've finally found out my speakers are performing different from one another.

So now I need to figure out why my speakers sound different from the same source, and figure some mono music is a good way to test this. All that comes to mind is some Kinks albums I have that are in both stereo and then repeated in mono.

Turns out one has a non-responsive woofer. The small one just underneath the tweeter (5.5" maybe?)

I tested this with alot of music and this woofer has not made the slightest vibration. I unscrewed it and checked the wiring and it seems fine.

So what I'm wondering is what should I do now? Is there anything I can try at home to get this woofer going? Is it the woofer or something else?

I'm quite positive that this woofer has never worked since I got these speakers because I've always noticed the M60's sounded different but like I said, I thought it was just me.

By switching them from left to right and the woofer non-responsive on both sides confirms that it's not an amp or wiring issue right?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

If the midrange driver (the one directly below the tweeter) is indeed broken I would think you would have noticed quite a change as thats a pretty important part of the speaker! You might not be able to feel vibration on that driver like you will on the woofers because it doesnt produce as low of frequencies but if you put your ear up to it and it doesnt make any sound then I would give axiom a call and they will send you a replacement. If you really want to make sure its the driver itself and not the crossover you can take the midrange out of the other speaker and put it in the broken one to see if it works. I wouldnt reccomend repeated taking out and putting back the drivers though because the cabinet is MDF afterall and you can only screw into it so many times before its stripped out even when your careful.

Hey that's a good idea. If I switch the good one in place of the other and it works that means the other woofer is actually bad right?

And yeah you'd think I'd have noticed this was a serious problem and not just a slight difference by now. I've always thought something was up but I didn't think it was an actual defect. I haven't owned many speakers and even thought maybe my amp wasn't the best and could be the problem.

But this woofer is definitely not producing any vibration whatsoever. I put on mono music, stereo music, and put my finger gently on both cones back and forth many times and this woofer is not making any vibration ever, while the other is constantly gently vibrating.

Thanks for your help btw!

You know, I've always thought my VP150 seemed a bit more laid back from my 80's, I may try to put my ear in front of each driver myself to see if one of them is not working, always a good thing to check I guess.

Update:

I switched the "bad" and good woofer and the good one wasn't working in the other speaker either

So I'm all worried it's the crossover now. So I pop open the crossover hatch and (eventually) realize the orange wire is lying loose underneath, and doesn't appear to have solder rosin on the tip of the wire. Was it ever soldered on? I'm not sure. I think if it was it was barely soldered properly. The other wires come right through the other side of the circuit board and the spot for this one there was no sign it had ever gone that far.

So anyway, I used the other crossover to figure out where to put the wire and soldered it on nicely.

Fired up some music and realized I had to re-set my left/right speaker levels. Did that and now everything sounds phenomenal! The speakers just sound awesome and work so well together.

I'm not upset about this at all though, Axiom speakers are awesome and really I deserve a beating for not realizing there was something wrong when I got them.

But everything is great now!

Good job in the diagnosis and repair, enjoy.

That's good news, Zer0. You've got about three years of listening to catch up on now!

WoW! 3 years.

It really is pretty dissapointing to hear that that was the problem. I would think they would have caught something like that at the factory. Its pretty hard to miss Must have been a friday with some hockey playoffs or something.

Glad to hear you got it working. nice job

Nice repairing. It's good to hear that, since they do remote repairing, all the parts seems to be fairly easy to access. In anycase, enjoy your catching up!

I thought all speakers were tested; maybe it came off during shipping?