How To Choose the Best Tower Speakers For Your Listening Tastes

Today, I'd like to run you through Axiom's floorstanding or tower speaker lineup. Now, you can't see all of it because I can't get the camera far enough back, but we're going to drop in a number of images while I describe the different models, so you'll have a good look at the different models, the driver complements, etc. So as their name suggests, floorstanding speakers or tower speakers stand or sit directly on the floor, unlike a bookshelf speaker, which can be placed in a bookshelf or you know, on a stand, if you prefer.

Now, currently, we have three core floorstanding models, the M60, the M80, and the M100. All three of those floorstanding speakers are true three-way systems, meaning that they have dedicated woofer, midrange or midranges, and tweeter or tweeters.

And, you know, many people will ask, "Well, which one is better sounding amongst the three?" And, you know, we really don't...we don't tend to make bad sounding loudspeakers. We have a philosophy based on the NRC research for building and designing neutral sounding loudspeakers.

So the character of all of our speaker models, including our floorstanding models is very similar. What you get when you go up in price or up in the model lineup is you tend to get a speaker that's going to play louder, have a little bit better bass extension, and you know, be suitable for larger and larger rooms.

But the M60, which is our smallest floorstander, it's no slouch in the performance department. In many applications, in let's say a small room, it's going to perform better than the M100, which might overpower the room in terms of bass. So you know, it's not a compromise in terms of speaker quality, you know, the build quality or the sound quality, it's just the trade-offs, in the bigger cabinet more woofers will give you more bass and more output capability.

So let's quickly run through those three core models. The M60, has two 6.5-inch woofers, a single 5.25-inch dedicated mid-range, and a 1-inch titanium dome tweeter. Moving up to the M80, we now have two 6.5-inch woofers with two 5.25-inch dedicated mid-ranges, and two 1-inch titanium dome tweeters.

Now, just to pause for a second, why two tweeters and two mid-ranges? Well, really, it's all about dynamics and power handling. By sharing the work between two tweeters and two mids, rather than a single one like you'll find in the M60, the speaker not only can play louder, it can handle dynamics better.

And when the speaker is just, you know, loafing along, and background music levels are at even fairly decent movie or music levels, the distortion of the mid and the tweeter sections is cut in half, again, because it's shared. That makes a huge difference in terms of clarity and detail. So, I always recommend if you have the space and the budget, the M80 is the nice, perfect middle ground floorstanding model.

Moving up to the M100, we now have triple 6.5-inch woofers. And these are high power woofers of standard, meaning that they have bigger motor and magnet systems so they can dissipate more heat. And they have a larger voice coil and more travel capability. It doesn't mean that they sound better than the standard 6.5-inch woofers, it just means that they have more capability to play at higher levels because there's more excursion and they're designed to handle more heat.

And just like the M80, the M100 has dual 5.25-inch dedicated mid-ranges, and dual 1-inch titanium dome tweeters. Now, about this high power woofer thing, you can order the M60 and the M80 in a high power version should you want those higher power woofers.

So, let's say you have a smallish room where the M60 would be perfect in terms of overall output and performance, but you really like to crank up the, you know, let's say the electronic music or you love lots of impact in your movies, you might want to go for the high power option where you're going to handle higher bass levels with lower distortion, and no risk of, you know, of overheating anything.

So that's always a good option if you want, you know, if your budget or the form factor of the smaller tower models is what you need, but you want that capability of the high power woofers, it's available. So those are the three core models. Now, I'm going to quickly go over the, you know, side series, I shouldn't say side series, it sounds like I'm, you know, I'm saying that we'll push it to the side, and it's not important.

There is a complimentary, three floorstanding speaker lineup called the LFR series, for linear field radiator. And these are our omnidirectional models. Those three models are the LFR660, the LFR880, and the LFR1100. And looking from the front, they are absolutely identical to, you know, their M60, M80, and M100 counterparts.

Exactly the same driver compliment on the front, no difference whatsoever. The distinguishing factor with the LFR series is they're omnidirectional, which means there's drivers on the back. So whatever mid and tweeter complement is on the front of, you know, an M60, M80, or M100 is duplicated on the back of the speaker.

Now, why do we do this? Well, it's to achieve this omnidirectional radiation pattern that's radiating sound all the way around the cabinet. Now, why would you want to do this? Well, basically, we have a formula for defining what the output coming out of the back of the speaker should be, so that it matches perfectly with what comes out of the front of the speaker.

And what it does is through the reflected information, because those drive units on the back, that sound is going to bounce off of a back wall, off the sidewall, etc. These models give you incredible soundstage, which means the size of a performance or a movie, it's just much bigger than our conventional M60, M80, or M100 speakers, it makes a massive difference in stereo.

I recommend to people, I mean, if you can afford it, and you can deal with the requirement, which I'll go into in one minute, and you listen predominantly, or it's a stereo-only system, the LFR models are the absolute best.

It's the pinnacle of performance in our lineup. Now, that one thing I wanted to mention is the requirement is to get the proportion of front and back in the LFR series controlled perfectly, we need to use a separate digital signal processor.

It's a box in a 2U chassis, two rack unit height, which handles all of the complex equalization, driver parameters, etc., that we need to vary to get the front and the back playing together the way we want to get this beautiful immersive sound field and not sacrifice detail imaging and neutrality.

What the DSP requires and the speaker requires though is also instead of a conventional floorstanding speaker, like our M60, M80, or M100, which requires, you know, one amplifier channel per speaker, the LFR series need two channels per speaker. So you need a four-channel amp or two two-channel amplifiers to run a pair of any of the LFR models.

So you know, there's one more model which was recently introduced, the LFR1100 Active. Now, this is the absolute ultimate, because it now breaks down a separate digital signal processor that controls each section of drive units in the speaker.

Now, why that's important, the same control in the other LFR models that we have between the front and the back, we now have that control for every driver section on the speaker. And in an LFR1100 Active there's five sections, the three woofers on the front, two mids on the front, two tweeters on the front, and then the two tweeters on the back and the two mids on the back.

Now, as you can imagine, that requires five amplifier channels for speaker. It's, you know, something that you have to be a real dedicated audio or home theatre nut. But if you hear it, you'll be absolutely amazed. It's not a system for everybody, it's complex.

And you know, admittedly, it's fairly expensive, but it is right now the state of the art in terms of performance. And, you know, we're really, really proud of that model. So, I hope that that gave you a quick run through of our lineup, which I said three core models.

And in total, if we include all the LFR models, there are seven models in the lineup. Again, you know, the quality of an M60 is as good as an LFR1100. The performance is obviously going to be better than the 1100 because it's an omnidirectional model.

But don't feel that, you know, you're shorting yourself if the M60 is the fit for your budget, your room, and the amount of, you know, system complexity that you're willing to live with. So I hope that that gives everybody a little bit of a rundown of where and what the different models are.

And again, feel free to contact us, you might be put in touch with me if you've got, you know, a problem, room or you just like suggestions, we're always here to answer your questions and help you get the best sound for your room and your budget. Thank you very much for watching.