Well first off you need to take into consideration what these “other” folks consider harsh. Ask them what speakers they currently have and then research those. Some folks prefer a laid back speaker and call a detailed speaker “bright”, “harsh”, “in your face” and other names. When in fact, these speakers do exactly what they should. - Accurately reproduce exactly what’s on the disk. Axioms do that very well. So if that means that an accurate speaker is a bright speaker, then so be it. I guess I like bright speakers. I want to hear everything, like those subtle guitar picks and finger squeaks on the strings. I like to hear the drum stick tap and slide off cymbals instead of a blurred crash. I don’t like to hear a fuzzy mess of treble, but the individual taps. Laid back speakers don’t do that. Some folks like a little extra bass and they tend to prefer speakers that have bumps in certain spots of the frequency range that really does nothing more than color the sound. I’d rather have a neutral speaker and tweak the tone controls to my liking rather than have a speaker do it for me.
The downside to detailed (bright) speakers is that those recordings that were not done very well sound like crap. But, they sound like crap on warm speakers too, but just not quite as bad. I struggled with this when I first got my 80’s and blamed the speakers and was all pissed off that some of my favorite CD’s sounded like crap. It took me a while to come to grips with that and ended up ordering as many that I could that have been remastered.
Isn’t there someone in your area with Axioms that you can audition? If so, take you favorite CD’s and Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. That’s my favorite auditioning CD. Time sounds pretty friggin cool on a good set of speakers. You get the high’s, lows and mids. The clocks and chimes intro is way cool on a detailed speaker. I’d hate to loose that.
