Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion What's New At Axiom Introducing the M5 and QS10

Those look excellent

I'm looking to get a vintage adcom 5800 and use my existing receiver as the pre pro. Thoughts on how that might work would be much appreciated.

Main concern with something like that adcom is fan noise.

I had my M80s connected to an old Crest Audio VS900 was fantastic
though the fan was annoying it will raise your noise floor quite a bit though it should be great. and once you turn it up the fan can disappear for a while.

Have since moved to one of the ADA amps so no longer an issue for me. But I didn't mind the fan noise so much.

You could remote locate your gear. Cleans everything up and leaves zero noise floor from case fans, hard drives, transformers etc. Once your gear is remote located you can add ups filtering/protection to your investment. When you go seperates my advice is to plan long term and consider expansion, cooling and protection. This means a gear closet or rack with active cooling. Not too daunting or pricey once you look into it. DIY all the way.

Wow those M5's really do look nice in that finish Dawid.
My on-wall M5's just arrived yesterday. I've only unboxed one so far just to see it. Looks great, exactly what I was expecting, matches my previous black oak on wall M22's just fine. Have not had time to hook them up yet, will do that over the weekend and post back next week. The power bracket looks a bit fiddly to get a solid speaker wire connection - does anyone have any tips or tricks with that??
I'm sure that'll work itself out quick enough. I do like the cloth bag they come in now.

Blind AB testing will not be possible, however I'll do my best to give a level unbiased opinion vs the I/O M22's I have in place now. And there will be pics :-)

Cheers,

Just came back from vacation (drove to Idaho for Boomershoot); M5HP's were waiting for me in the driveway. It was about 2am when I got home so only had a chance to listen for a few minutes so far but first impressions are *really* good.

The speakers are much larger than typical Axiom bookshelf speakers, which is good to see. Not saying that all of the Axiom bookshelf speakers should be larger, but it's nice to see at least one seriously big bookshelf. I always felt that was a hole in the product line.

Bass extension seems decent and smooth; enough for any of the tracks I played and I was picking tracks with deep bass. The speakers definitely like power - with a (200 WPC into 8 ohms) Adcom 555 amp I was running close to clipping levels and the sound was both "sufficiently loud" and very clear.

Not sure what the right words are to describe what I heard, but in the very good systems I have really liked in the past there was a combination of tightness, flatness and ability to handle power/volume which somehow resulted in a slightly different sound from what you heard on lesser systems. I heard that on the M5HPs and was really happy about it.

Will post some pics over the weekend and do some speaker swapping to confirm what I think I am hearing.

Welcome home bridgman, hope blowing stuff up was as fun as it sounds and you still have all of your appendages! :-)

I couldn't resist and took a slightly extended lunch break working from home office today and messed around with my one unboxed M5 OnWall for center channel only. I mostly ran some calibration pink noise & signal sweeps to get a feel for it. Quite impressed so far. Was surprised to find my previous calibration levels still held and it was level matched at the same offset to my in/on wall M22's. I was expecting I'd have to bump it up a few db.
Also learned my dog likes to howl along with pink noise and signal sweeps! LOL.
The M5 On wall does extend lower than my M22's as expected, although they are surprisingly not far behind. I demo'd a short Wall-E scene from Disney WOW disc (track 9 in the Experience section for those with the disc) and the punch from Eve's blaster arm made me jump the 1st time I had it cranked. So far so good. Can't wait to get all 3 pumping up front. More to come when life and wife permits...

Cheers,

Oh nice - you have (the first ?) on-walls. I imagine a lot of people will be following your posts as you get them set up. Sounds like you have a good dog there - although I imagine the singing must affect the results a bit ?

Boomershoot was really good; very well organized and lots of fun. It was a long drive (three days each way) but worth it. The opening fireball failed to ignite (the explosion blew out the road flares before they could ignite the gasoline so we all got drenched in gas instead) but everything else worked as planned.

The fireball setup is different (bigger) every year so it does go wrong sometimes - this one was 50 pounds of explosive & 34 gallons of gasoline, so the road flares should probably have been placed a lot further out.

Normally it looks something like this... 2015 opening fireball

Did a bit more listening to the M5HP's this morning with a focus on jazz & acoustic instruments. I am really liking these speakers - they seem to pick up a lot of what I liked about the Sierra-1's (more natural acoustic piano sound, tightness/clarity on complex passages) without giving up any of the things I already like about Axioms.

OK, started the first speaker-swapping (between M5HP and M60v4) and ran into the usual "D'oh !!" discoveries.

Some (but not all) of the difference in perceived tonal balance seems to have been caused by different relationships between drivers and ear height. The M5's are on fairly tall stands and so the midrange driver is roughly ear level, while the M60s are on short (5") stands which bring the tweeter to ear level.

The first big difference I noticed from switching in the M60s was the impression of more treble and a more dynamic sound from the M60s. Moving my head up and down several inches allowed me to reproduce a good part of that difference with the M5s (by getting my ears aligned with the M5 tweeter), but the obvious question was what that meant I should do with the setup. First thought was that I might need to take a chainsaw to the M5 stands, but then I remembered that I was planning to put the chair on casters, lifting it by ~5" and making it about the right height for me and for the M5's.

That won't help with the M60s though... I would hate to have to buy LFR's or M100's just to get the right tweeter height

Stepping back 15 feet or so eliminated most of the impact of ear height so the two speakers sounded more similar, but there was still a slight but noticeable difference in tonal balance between the M5s and the M60s, with my preference being for the M5's.

The M5's are definitely less efficient than the M60s. The level control on my receiver is not marked in dB but from previous testing with an SPL meter it felt like "a few dB" of adjustment was needed to match levels.

There were still some cases where the M60s seemed to have too much bass as set up in my room while the M5s seemed "just right". The "too much bass" was only on certain notes so probably still need more bass trapping if I can find a place to put it.

I am gradually coming to the conclusion that my listening area may be too small for ideal placement of larger speakers - raising the M60s a few inches helped but not completely. It occurred to me that my next step probably should have been playing with port plugs in the M60s rather than buying new speakers, but I still really like the M5s so no regrets.

Anyways, next thing I am going to try is pulling the M60s even further into the room ("stupid far") to see what difference that makes. IIRC when I started playing with room acoustics in this house I originally oriented the system across the living room and found the M60s sounded best almost 4 feet from the wall, but the bass was incredibly uneven (seemed to be a function of the long cathedral ceiling) and so I ended up having to rotate everything 90 degrees which gave me the current setup.

In case you are wondering why no pics, my ISP's servers seem to be in a pissy mood and are not allowing me to upload or download anything. I will note that the grills are shaped differently on the M5HPs, with a slight angle to the top and bottom edges. I like it. The wood finish is Knotty Pine with clear semi-gloss finish, and looks extremely good.

Rather than moving the M60s further into the room, which would have introduced other listening challenges, I plugged the lower rear port on each M60 using a pair of old (but clean) socks for each speaker. That seems to have had the desired effect, eliminating the "too much bass on some notes" problem and bringing the sound of the M60s closer to that of the M5HPs.

The change in sound from plugging one port on each speaker is fairly significant, enough that I'm going to try taking the speakers off the 5" stands and putting them back on the floor, albeit tipped up a bit with 1" wood under the front feet to point the tweeters up at ear level.

EDIT - yep, that worked. Bass levels still seem right, and tilting the M60s rather than lifting them gets both midrange & tweeters pointing to ear level. The differences between the speakers are now much more subtle, so I guess I need to start comparing them all over again. That's going to have to wait a while, unfortunately, and I really should get a speaker switch box going first.

And yes, I should have tried plugging a port on the M60s a long time ago.

The M5HP seems like a really important addition to the Axiom product line, filling a gap between M3/M22 and M50/M60 that has existed since the M40 was dropped.

The M40 was really a music-only speaker though, while the M5HP fills a gap for both HT (with sub) and music (without sub) applications.