Hi everyone - please allow a brief introduction, or re-introduction, to the Axiom forum. It's pretty cool seeing a lot of the same faces here that were present back when I was doing reviews.
Some of you may already know this, so pardon my boring "catch up" stuff ... from 2001 until 2010, I did a series of on line reviews, with a different twist. The reviews were always of competing products, with a fairly lengthy process, and a lot of input from various forum members.
Over the past 4 years, I have attempted to make a "go" at manufacturing and selling home theater products as "Chase Home Theater". My hope with this little company was to give my brother something special on which to hang his hat as the manufacturing side of the equation. As it turned out, he was not as interested as I hoped, and the company ceased operations in November, 2014.
Full disclosure time - we still have a small amount of inventory to sell off .. about 40 subs, 140 speakers and some hefty power amps. This "sell off" is being facilitated at Home Theater Shack, and if anyone looked at the products and pricing, one would quickly see we are not selling gear in which the Axiom buyer would be interested.
Now that we have the intro done .... to review process, which is also going to take place at Home Theater Shack ...
I will be starting the reviews just as they were previously done - they will be purchased, set up in our system at home, and compared to competing products. The process will include pretty straight forward language about the strengths and weaknesses of each product, with the usual caveat that these are merely opinions, although hopefully useful opinions.
I am posting here for two reasons ...
1. Ian was the first manufacturer to respond to emails sent that this review process was getting "kicked off" again. As he knows we do a lot of blind listening tests, and as Ian also is pretty relaxed about this stuff, he was enthusiastic.
2. I would like input from the forum regarding speakers to be tested - not only Axiom speakers, but also those of the competition.
We are considering everything from M50, M60, M80, M100, LFR660, LFR880 and LFR1100 in the Axiom range.
For competitors, we will look at PSB, Paradigm, Ascend, Martin Logan ... The floor is yours to chime in with ideas of speakers you might like to see compared, including from companies not mentioned here.
I do this because it's a lot of fun. To those who have participated in these events in the past, hopefully you will join in again.
No one expects this to be some sort of "tell you what to buy" scenario. What we want to accomplish is to show, in real world systems, some ideas on how to get great sound for the $$$.
To this end, we even keep a variety of receivers and amps on hand - right now, we have NAD (317 integrated), McIntosh (MA-6900 amp), Marantz (7008 receiver) and even an entry level Denon 1712 receiver (an entry level receiver, imo, is essential to this process - too many companies test entry level speakers with multi buck amps, and all too often, these entry level speakers fail big time with the type of electronics normally used with them).
We may even add an Axiom amp to the mix, along with a dedicated pre-amp processor for higher end stuff.
This first test will strictly be two channel, and tower speakers.
If you have read this far, thank you, and if there are any suggestions, fire away!
