I think we're being too hard on Ninja. Sure the timing is unfortunate but my experience with technology licenses is that they drag on forever and you never know if they will really close or not until the day they (finally) get signed.

I would not be surprised if the new crossover sounded better, and I doubt the folks at Axiom would be all that surprised either. I believe the crossovers in the production Axiom speakers get changed occasionally, although I'm not sure whether the changes are to accomodate a "new improved" design, or to compensate for changes in the driver components, or both.

Now, leaping cheerfully into shoes I haven't earned...

If I were in Ian's shoes, I probably wouldn't want to see the design of the crossover, if only because if there was one of those "obvious once you see it" improvements it would be a real awkward situation re: adopting the idea -- and it would drive me crazy if I *couldn't* adopt it ;\)

If I were in Sean's shoes, I would quietly fix up the graph as Tom suggested because my target market will be every bit as nitpicky as we are, maybe even more so. The vertical offset in the graphs set off a red flag for me and immediately made me suspicious that something else was being "snuck into the picture" although I certainly couldn't find anything amiss and the graphs did look reasonable.

If I was... well... all of you nice folks... I would try to encourage the discussion to continue. One of the nice things about the Axiom forum is that we don't babble on at length about the kind of extraordinary sound you can only get if the speaker wires are precisely 4.5" off the ground (for 8 ohm speakers, of course)... but on the other hand there are some characteristics of a sound system we don't know enough about and probably would do well to discuss a bit more (soundstage width, imaging, all the words like "grittiness" which I can sometimes imagine I hear but can not explain).

I don't know what makes one speaker differ from another in those nuances and the crossover may be one of the elements (presumably phase response). Could be the drivers, could be the placement of the drivers on the front panel, heck I even hear credible people saying the electronics make a difference.

Anyways, the challenge with talking about all that stuff is that you need to be both extremely suspicious and extremely respectful at the same time. That makes for a very high bar and I'm not sure we totally met it in this thread.

Anyways, if the test is still on I'm sure looking forward to the results. Calgary isn't that far away, is it ?

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
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