Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion What's New At Axiom Exciting News From Axiom!

The way I look at it is if I were to decide to upgrade my mains or whole system for that matter (can’t imagine why I would unless I won the lottery and then I’d upgrade my house (read room) first) I would revisit all potential speakers that focus on neutral presentation. So say if the new Axioms came in at the same price as the B&Ws I though sounded better than the M80s (but not 3 times better) then I would also consider the B&Ws as viable upgrades. To do otherwise out of brand loyalty would not make any sense to me.

Very good points, but I'll say that brand loyalty does make some sense. If you have a history of being taken care of by the company, that's value, too. Also, if I'm only upgrading mains, sticking with the same brand for timbre matching to the rest of the surround system is something else to consider. Of course, we don't yet know how well they match the current lineup and have only been told that the VP180 would be the most appropriate center to match with the new flagships. You're right that I should still look at speakers from other manufacturers in the same price range, whatever that ends up being. I still think there are compelling reasons to stick with the same brand, but I would still expect the new speakers to outperform the M80s by a fair margin, or why keep them.

Very good points, but I'll say that brand loyalty does make some sense. If you have a history of being taken care of by the company, that's value, too.

I find it difficult to believe that Axiom can produce a new type of speaker that can outperform the M80s by a fair margin let alone do it without costing a fair amount more.

For now I would like to add that this new product has been just a fantastic journey in the making. Though the early beginnings go back about 10 years, it really began in earnest a few years ago when Andrew and I had the first opportunities to hang out and chat about our prior experiences and experiments. It became apparent rather quickly that our combined experiences could be put together to create a whole new direction for a speaker design. As a base we had all the experiments that we had done over the years that had netted similar results, even though they were being done in separate laboratories and without any collusion back and forth. This brought some real clarity to a plethora of elements about speaker design. Of course a lot of these experiments were pretty mainstream anyway so similar results would be expected but there were also quite a number that were not. Added to this we had the experiments we had done that were in totally different directions. Here we had the opportunity to collaborate and develop new experiments.

I guess if I had to boil it down to the two most prominent and broad categories that we were collaborating on it would be the utilization of DSPs and the utilization of omni-directional design. These two main foundations, plus a multitude of other ideas and experiences, could now be used to carve out some totally new territory. As with all things Axiom this new direction had to ultimately prove itself out in Double Blind Listen Testing. For Andrew the Double Blind Test was nothing new since it was very much in keeping with the methodology followed at API. I guess given the early roots of both Axiom and API at the NRC this is not surprising.

So after all these years we are now just about ready to unveil the first product of this research. I might add that along with our new speaker model will be the ability to juice the performance of some of our existing models. From a timing point of view we are currently building the prototypes for the show and should be done sometime in the next few weeks. It is our plan to take a pile of photos and post them here when those samples are completed. I think once we have this visual would be a sensible time to start going over the details.

Until very recently, Axiom did not discuss future products - period. You'd know about it when it became available for purchase. A few forum comments complained about this.... Axiom took note of those complaints. Now they have decided to "let the cat out of the bag" a bit early. Now that is being compared to AV123....