As I've said before, I kinda admire the simple driver complement in the M50s & in the M22s/M2s as well. After owning fat speakers from the 70s & 80s that featured all kinds of drivers plastered randomly over the front baffle, I've come to feel that simpler is often the best, IMO anyway...
TAM
TAM --
A reasonable point of view. Your rosewoods are a thing of beauty too.
Just a few weeks now until my m80s (regular V4s) and EP500s arrive. My use will be primarily theater, secondarily music (although just music at first, until the room is finished). The intention is to use the subs to round out the bottom end for both use cases, as in your setup. I know that some prefer to use a full range speaker only for music, and this is a trend that Axiom has supported actively and explicitly with their m100 and lfr1100 models. Matt has the big boys, and finds that approach more pleasing. I respect his opinion. Troy seems to favor the full range approach as well, but is finding that the regular m80s, while coming very close, are not quite full range at reference levels. That's not too surprising either, as Axiom has said the same as the reason of entry for the m100 and lfr1100 models, quoting the following from
here (with some skips).
We started with what was then our flagship the M80, which has been around since the mid 90s. That’s not a speaker we ever looked at as having any sort of limitation. It has good frequency response, good extension, sounds great, can play loud . . . there really weren’t any major identifiable issues. But in most applications, our customers were using M80s in the context of a home theater system with a subwoofer.
When you take a subwoofer out of the equation, now extension and linear extension, particularly at very low frequencies, becomes something that you are looking for. You need to have good dynamic capability at those low frequencies to really give you the sense that you’ve got full bottom-end, full frequency range, and you’re not losing anything – especially at high levels.
There were two major things we needed to address. The first one was the newly redesigned woofer, which is available in high-powered versions for the M60 and M80 as well. It’s a woofer with a larger voice coil. It’s got a larger roll surround, which means there is more linear excursion capability, and it can handle far more amplifier power than the existing M80 can. Now that’s not to say the M80 is any slouch! But if you’re going to be running high levels right down to 30Hz or 25Hz, you need that power handling capability.
The other thing that we’ve got to remember is that if you’re only going to have two loudspeakers carrying the full range, if you’ve got really high dynamics, you’re not splitting that output level between five or seven speakers and a subwoofer anymore – you have to get that out of two speakers. So in large spaces you have to run more power through the speakers to get that satisfying dynamic level up. In the tweeter to deal with power handling, we’ve gone to a die-cast faceplate assembly. The old one was plastic. That’s actually significantly increased the power handling capability of the tweeter due to the cooling: we’re actually using the faceplate as a heat [sink].
We’ve started to trickle down the developments into the other models, but the M100 is really an ultimate statement of a true full-range speaker that is perfectly suited to two-channel reproduction.
So what's my point of view? I'm not entirely sure, but I'll give it a shot. I haven't had the luxury of auditioning multiple setups at the factory, which would be ideal. But, I don't personally a priori subscribe to the "purist" notion of cutting the sub out for music. And, having a pair of top end subs coming, I couldn't see the point of disabling them for music. So, the logical question seems to be "do I really even need the m80s?". As noted above, it does seem that the woofer cones have a rather small window in which to play dominantly, say 80-160 Hz, one octave, if using subs with a standard crossover. Maybe that's just a very specific and important, albeit narrow, window, and they do it very well. Maybe they actually are contributing in parallel along with the 5.25" drivers considerably up the register into the upper midbass & midrange and improve power handling in that way (as referenced in the prior question).
I'm very curious, but at some level I don't really care. I've wanted a pair of m80s for over a decade, and darn it, that's what I'm getting. I guess I'm a "more is more" guy at heart, even if the more seasoned and wise approach is occasionally (usually?) perhaps "less is more". In fact, if cost wasn't an overriding consideration I'd definitely want the HP upgrade on the front three (with VP180) just to make sure I wasn't "missing something", even though the explicit justification for that driver is as a proxy for the subwoofer. Its a psychological flaw on my part, which seems to be not so uncommon among "enthusiasts". Come to think, maybe that's a decent definition of enthusiasm.
Rambling aside, really looking forward to my speakers. Shouldn't be too long now.