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

Concerning further upgrades, I'm pleased with what my system now offers with 2 sets of M22 mains, VP160 + M2 for center, EP350 for sub. My only future planned upgrade with be 3 QS8's. 2 sooner, 1 later, for a 6.1 system. That'll supply about all the audio my living room can handle. Then later, some day, I'll have a big screen in the small home theater room that I'll be building. One thing at a time.

I'm hoping by then, 9-10 foot oled screens will be available. My only problem with that is no-where decent to put the speakers. That's why I wanted an AT projection screen. It would be nice if oled screens could someday be used in this fashion, and be available in 2.40:1 format.

JBall,

A lot of what you are pondering comes down to distribution and manufacturing, not marketing. If we used a dealer distribution model or we did not manufacture our own drivers, and pretty much every single component in our products, then we would not have the ability to offer our customers a choice with things like die cast baskets, bi-wiring, custom coloured grilles, or hundreds of finishes. We would need to make a decision in advance as to what most customers would want at any given price point and that would be it. It is not a swipe at our competitors to offer these things as options; it is just something we can do because we do our own manufacturing and our own distribution.

I've also never seen a speaker company with a members forum where the President of the company regularly and openly corresponds to members about products and concern. Only other place I've seen like that is Emotiva.

That's why I own all Axiom speakers and Emotiva amps. I trust their people and their products; hell, I've pit up a couple post in this forum that Ian has responded to personally and yes, that means a lot to me.

I've been to some of the more expensive speaker sites and other than a press release (usually put out by a P.R. Group) not either seen correspondence from the company owners direct to customers or forum members about the products or better food at the next company/customer get together!

Axiom (Emotiva too) demonstrate time and time again that they are a true customer driven company. I dont know how involved the more expensive companies are with their customer in relation to what kind of products they put out. So it's clear, those companies do put out good products; but so does Axiom.

Difference is I can email or post to the president and his wife about almost anything and you know what, they respond.

I also don't build speakers; but I sure do enjoy listening to them. I leave the building to people who know what they are doing, have pit out good product time and time again, really listen to their customer base, openly communicate with said customers and invite us to their place of business regularly..

So if the new flagship speakers come with wicker baskets in them, I have no doubt that for their product, our product it was the best choice to put out the best product for us, the paying customer of yesterday, today and tomorrow; not simply because that's what all the other 'big guys' are doing.

thanks for the explanation Ian. I agree it's great the manufacturer responds directly to us here. very cool.

To add one final point, Paradigm makes all their own drivers and assembles their products in Canada. Most of their drivers are cast baskets for what it's worth starting at speakers of about $600/pair.

AV123?

Actually that Axiom representatives seldom wade into the fray is a big plus IMO.



While this makes perfect sense, to the customer it is mainly marketing which is why I think issues like this keep cropping up. People are conditioned through conventional wisdom that certain things or designs are a necessity in certain products. So when Axiom deviates from this conventional wisdom it becomes a marketing issue to re-educate the customer to what really matters . . . how the speakers sound as a whole . . . and not the necessarily the design and individual components they are made from.

I also think that the higher the price (read high end) a product the more people expect it to have certain characteristics so when something deviates from what they expect they suffer a lot of cognitive dissonance based on what the market has told them made even worse if they’ve made purchasing decisions based on the conventional wisdom. This makes the re-education of the customer all the more important and difficult if not impossible, at least until third party “experts” (reviewers) chime in and even then the true believers will discount the reviews as being biased for various reasons.

I meant that they are not invisible or inaccessible to us. Ian and his wife have posted in this thread lots of great information which has been very relevant and important. I do agree that they for the most part are not meddlesome per say in the forum.

It's nice to see them post and know that they actually exist; I have no idea who the CFO for my bank is and that person or persons have never directly contacted us a customers of the bank (other than to tell us about higher fees) however I do know who the president of my speaker company is; and he communicates directly with us for much more than to tell us the cost of speakers are going up.

JB, you seem to be hung up on a single aspect of the speaker's construction. If you understand Axiom's design philosophy, you should understand that they do not tend to spend money on components that make no audible difference. They also don't base their decisions on what "everyone else" in the market offers. They are giving "discerning" consumers the explicit choice of spending more on select components so they can have peac of mind.

Big picture-wise, I think more consumers will be better served by Axiom's decision to make these costlier components an upgrade option than to have them standard. You can't please everyone, though.

JBall,

I don’t want to speak for Paradigm in any way but I can say from my own experience that offering a large number of personalized options without a direct to end user distribution model would be fraught with insurmountable problems. On top of this it is no easy task to set up your manufacturing process to deal with offering lots of options, and this statement is from direct experience also.

We will be offering cast baskets as an option starting with the M2. This would allow the customer to choose die cast woofer baskets, for an extra $15 per pair, on a model that sells for $328 if they so desire. It’s part of our philosophy of offering the most options we can to our customers. Since we launched "Customize Yours" a few years ago the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We also use this feedback to decide what new customized features are things people would want us to offer.

that's a fair deal, thanks.

From my understanding the President of AV123 was active on the forum to defraud people out of money for products that he had no intention of making..... I would put Ian in the same group as said individual....