Hi All! After years of hemming and hawwing about getting a decent sound system, I've bought a house, fished all my wires through the wall, set up an in wall entertainment stand, and now am finally able to worry about speakers. I'm looking for clear, detailed mids/highs and want accurate (not necessarily powerful) bass for home theater and music listening. Long story short, speaker research has led me here, and negotiations with the wife have given me enough budget to purchase the following (soon to be arriving in the mail):

- VP150 center channel
- EP350 sub
- QS8 surround speakers
- M3 L/R speakers

I was originally planning on sticking the left and right speakers on book case shelves to both save space and (more importantly) keep the wife happy. Everyone that I've talked to about this idea has said that it's a bad one for sound quality however, which is making me think that it won't work as well as originally planned. Anyone have an opinion on this? If the shelf mounting douesn't sound good and I'm free of the speaker size restriction, would it be worth ordering/checking out the M22 as well? Or should I stick with the M3 in my setup?

i think it would help those who could help with your request if you were to post a few photos of your room;
also how you listen to music/movies; loudness levels, room size, including opening to other rooms, etc... anything that can help.

Thanks for your reply! I'm away from the house at the moment so can't give you a picture, but will try to describe the room accurately:

LxWxH - 16 ft, 12 ft, 8 ft

Front of Room: A fireplace flanked by two book cases takes up the entire front wall (hence no room for tower speakers). TV is mounted above the fireplace, there is a concrete shelf about 7 ft wide, 15 inches deep, and 10 inches tall built into the front of the fireplace. (My backup plan is to put the bookshelf speakers on top of this concrete shelf)

Left side of room (looking forward from the couch) has three windows about 3ft by 4ft. Right side of room (looking forward from the couch) has the opening into the room. It's about 7ft wide, and opens into an open landing/staircase area (L, W, H - 7 ft, 10 ft, 18 ft high).

The back of room has a large L shaped sectional in the left rear corner. There are hardwood floors, and a rug covers most of the area in front of the sectional.

This room is used for regular conversation volume television watching, medium volume movie watching, and occasional very loud music playing. We've currently got a small Sony home theater in a box setup that my old roommate from university gave me which doesn't sound terrible, but seems underpowered for the room that we have.

Guitar, the M22's will give you a better sonic match to your VP150(same drivers) as well as more midrange support with the two woofers vs the M3's which use a single larger woofer. If you were to stick with the M3's(an excellent speaker) I'd go with a third M3 as center for the best timbral match on the fronts. Just my opinion, of course.

Steve, welcome. One significant factor that you didn't mention is the position of the couch. If it's almost at the back wall, along with the horizontal part of the sectional, you'd be around 13-14' from the screen and front speakers, and it'd be a good idea to have the mains separated as widely as you could.

Placement on the bookcase shelves wouldn't necessarily create any problems. The speakers shouldn't be recessed into the bookcase, but should have the front edge protruding a little(say 1/2"), to minimize reflections and refractions from the surface of the bookcase. As long as there's at least a couple inches open behind the speaker, that's enough "breathing room" for the rear ports.

If you're going to stay with the bookshelves, the question would be is there enough room to place a M22 vertically. Subject to available room, my thought is to get M22 mains and a vertical M2 center. This would also be less costly than the list you propose.

The couch is a large, L-shaped sectional and will be about a foot away from the left wall, and a foot away from the back wall which does put it about 13/14ft away from where the speakers will be going. The bookcases can't be moved unfortunately. I've tried sticking some speakers in the book case and immediately got a weird boomy sound, so it's looking like that option is out.

A vertical center is a good idea, but it won't work for our room. The center speaker will end up in front of the fireplace on the center of the small concrete shelf and can't be too tall or it will block that. Looks like I'm down to two options . . . put the mains is on either side of the concrete shelf (limited L/R audio field but I can get larger bookshelfs like the M22s) or put the M3s on top of my book cases and have the tweeters nowhere near ear level (but much wider apart).

Hmm, two people and two recommendations for the M22s over the M3s so far. Are they a noticeably better speaker?

Thanks for all of your help!

I own M3's and I've listened to M22's in the same spot as well. They are both excellent speakers. The M22's definitely have a more forward (midrange) sound with the dual 5 1/4's and the M3's have a much warmer and laid back sound. While some would point out the freq response of the M22's goes lower than the M3's I can tell you to my ears (and others in the room when we were switching back and forth) the M3's low end was much more impressive with it's 6 1/2 inch woofer.

If you plan to always use the sub with the speakers I would recommend the M22's. If you like to play some 2 channel music without relying on a sub you may want to consider the M3's.

M22 or M3 isn't so much a case of better speaker as it a case of different sounding speaker. As Ben noted the M3 has less midrange giving a a more laid back sound and at the same time it has a slightly depressed lower midrange and a slightly increased upper bass giving it the impression of more bass. This is a good thing if you are without a subwoofer.

The M22 is a very neutral/flat speaker design, very little coloration to the sound and more indicative of the usual neutral Axiom sound however, there are a number of people with M3/VP150 combination and love it. It comes down to personal preferences.

FYI the M22 and VP100/VP150 work very well on a mantle as seen here.

Sounds like I should take advantage of axioms return policy and try out both speakers (returning the one that I don't like as much). Thanks for your advice!

I got everything setup last night ( only issue with the speakers was a humming subwoofer - ground loop screw removal solved that ) with the M3s, and it sounds very very good. I'll be swapping the M22s back and forth with them over the next week or so to make up my mind, and will post my thoughts in here in the future.

I've very impressed with the amount of low end that the M3s put out so far . . . they don't really sound like little speakers at all.

Nope they sure don't.

Well, we've decided on the keeping the M22s after all.

The M3s do sound like they've got a lot more low end than the M22s. With all five speakers engaged while watching TV/movies (including my required sound test movie, the 5th Element) the M22s just seemed to blend in more seamlessly though. If I was really being picky, I'd say that I could notice a slight difference when sound was moving from the mains to the center channel. Having the sub on seemed to help the M22s a lot.

For our music test we listened to a lot of different stuff, Coltrane, Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Radiohead, the Eagles, etc. The M3s only outshone the M22s with the sub on one particular track, 'Mouth's Cradle' by Bjork . . . it's like they were made for that tune. They pulled out some low sounding grunts and vocal noises that I'd never really noticed before.

If I was listening to them just on their own, I might have kept the M3s, but with the sub the M22s sounded a little bit more detailed/clear with music and more balanced with the other speakers as a home theater.

I guess that it goes without saying that everything sounded much better than the speakers/reciever in a box that I was using previously. All testing was done with my new Denon AVR-1912. Hopefully this will keep me happy for a long time . . . because our audio budget has been depeleted for many years to come.

PS - I really like the QS-8s too . . . we've got them mounted behind our listening position (due to room shape) and I was worried about how the surround effect would work out. They make the room feel much bigger and work well no matter where you're sitting.

I've made the blanket comment before that, with Axiom speakers, the higher the cost, the better they sound (base models only, ignoring special orders).

I've been told that's a stupid way to look at it and each speaker should be analyzed on it's own merits.

But, almost 100% of the time, the more you pay, the better they sound, has shown to be true.

That has not been my experience. If you modify that to "The higher the list price, the better they sound" then I might agree to a certain point.

See this thread for what I'm talking about:
http://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=211682&page=1

Note that I prefixed my message with "with Axiom speakers". I wasn't referring to just any other speaker. But, yeah. I'm not talking about an Axiom speaker "on sale" sounding worse than one not on sale.

As a M3 owner everything you said sounds very reasonable. Hope you enjoy your speakers!

Steve, I'm sure that you'll enjoy your M22s, as I have mine for a little over 10 years now. It's always interesting when the M3 vs M22 bass is described and sometimes the M3 is credited with even "a lot more low end". This illustrates again how the boost in the upper bass around 100-150Hz that some speakers(including the M3s)have can give the impression of greater bass extension farther down in frequency. As I've pointed out several times, the larger M22 enclosure is actually tuned just slightly lower than the M3 and the real bass extension is a bit deeper.

OK, a couple more questions for the venerable audio gurus here . . .

1. How much of a difference does it make going between the EP500 and the EP350 subs? I'm pretty happy with the 350 for movies/music, but yesterday ran a few test tones through it and realized that it's not giving out much signal below 25 Hz or so.

2. If I added an EP500 sub (or maybe I win the lottery and can afford an EP800, who konws :P) to my setup in the (far distant) future, would that work well to give me some additional low end and smooth out the room response? Or is it better to run matched subs?



We must be used to hearing most of our bass in the 80 - 150 Hz range or something then . . . it really didn't sound like the M22s were going lower than the M3s(although I know by the spec sheet that they do).

The EP500 will extend lower, but will not smooth out the bass. I imagine you will notice a difference in movies like Transformers that have significant LFE content.

This the difference between a truly linear speaker and one that is mostly linear, a few db here and there at well placed points makes a noticeable difference.