Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Which Power Source for M60ti? Newbie.

I think you know this but I'll say it anyway. Price can't be used to compare speaker performance. A competent speaker designer, with appropriate engineering tools at his/her disposal, can make more enjoyable speakers with bottom of the barrel parts than a poor designer with great parts who does nothing more than back of the envelope calculations. The amount of time the design team is given and the design budget of course also matters and so does manufacturing capability.

Another aspect of price is expected sales volume. What do I have to price my speaker at to sell a particular volume and how does that inform the material cost and R&D budget I can support for that design in order to extract a profit?

Corporate objectives also matter. I can sure as shit tell you Ian's objectives are different than KEFs. Ian does stuff because he wants to and can. KEF, Harman, Klipsch and the big brands agonize over whether a particular idea ought to be brought to market because they want to bet right and that includes price and getting quick payback. I totally doubt Ian thinks about payback.

Well said!

Figured i'd add this current observation here, as it sort of relates to my thread i created way back at the beginning...

Axiom Transformer: I still really like this piece and the DAC too. I did a very quick comparison over a weekend, although not A/B, of the Axiom DAC to a Schiit Modi and preferred the Axiom. The Schiit Modi is good but the Axiom DAC semed more " clear " and the treble sounded better / smoother, especially at high volume than the Modi. Although i will admit I have a major bias to the Axiom DAC as that is what i've been listening to exclusively. But there is a tangible difference in the sound. I wan't thinking it would be a diference at all really. But I digress, my main post is below, read on...

So I directly connected the Axiom Transformer to the "main in" power on my HK 505, thus bypassing the HK internal pre amp. The HK is on loan from my brother as we are doing some experimentation with his treble response of his speakers described in another thread elsewhere...

Anyway, with the Transformer set up as a direct pre amp and feeding just the power section of the HK inegrated (it's a dual mono setup) it sounds incredible to me. It's actually quite shocking how good it is. For the first time, with ease, i get a soundstage that goes properly beyond the outside of the speakers by a real amount with a majority of recordings. It's astonishing! The seperation is way better, the image is clean and things have more space. I've never experienced that before with that amount of space of each individual instrument. The depth was also increased and easy to achieve with most songs i listened too. The off axis perforance is also improved! My head does not need to stay locked into position. I can move around, not a ton of movement, but the image allows more movement before disappearing! Truly a revelation, these dam speakers are amazing!

I purposefully selected recordings i know to be good quality. I should add, the source was Spotify running via the Spotify Connect feature from my phone. The transformer was getting the Spotify feed from wi-fi not over airplay. I remained astonished. This begs the next obvious question, how much better would this sound with better amplifers? Or an even better pre amp? The less proverbial "clutter" in the signal chain the better I think. I've always read that and know that but never been able to try it.

So, this may be normal for some of you, but i was truly amazed at this simple step of how the chain of signal is setup / distributed made so much difference. Seperating the pre-amp and amp really does matter, in my case anyway. Not sure im going to be able to go back to my Yamaha when i give back the HK to my brother.

I think this is a testament to the quality of the Axiom Transformer used a dedicated pre amp.

One caveat, with the Transformer I have had a few times that the user interface was not responding and the volume control become non intuitive. This only happened when in the app directly and has never been an issue when controlling from within the Spotify Connect via my phone. This could be disastorous when using as a direct preamp. Normally i've got it fed into the receiver into one of the regular single ended inputs and can use the volume knob on the reciever to " limit " the amount of output or fine tune the " gain ", so to speak.

Another point is the gain structure was different too when using Transformer as a Pre amp directly. I use the " single step " setting and have the attenuation set to " natural" vs the " linear " option. So when using my phone to single step my volume up i reached about 75-80% of the available gain before stopping. I could have gone higher and will try that later today but I feel like the gain wasn't allowing me to access all the power of the amplifier.....is this possible if the gain / (voltage?) structure isn't the same or close enough of the pre amp and amp? I hope that makes some sense to y'all.

Bottom line, it was a fun and exciting experiment and resulted in a marked improvement in my system. Even the bass, that as of late has been emotionally lacking impact with in my new large space, was improved and the overall sense and feel of the whole range was improved and brought out a bit more of the impact ive been missing. It's still not enough for the giant room im in but it was remarkable. I should give it a try in my bedroom and see how it sounds before returning the HK to my brother.

I wish i could instantly A/B this in real time to prove it. I swear im sober and actually heard these things, it was not placebo. Looking forward to my next listening session this evening!

A heckuva post.
I thought i was one of the rare few that wrote books in here.

The hardest thing about doing /setting up an A/B test is getting all the variables under control. As much as we think and try to tell ourselves that we won't have bias, there will always be something. For example, if the SPL output is not virtually identical between the two units being played back, then even with an A/B switch you will notice a difference that you might attribute to being the 'better' unit when the reason could come back to something as simple as a difference in signal to gain ratios for the units.
It is less distinct a factor to put your finger on compared to amps, but provides a huge difference, when comparing speakers that have different efficiencies.

Ultimately since so few people have the means to do true A/B testing, you have to use whatever method you have to try and ascertain a difference. It is the primary reason that drives audio myths, though in part unintentionally because of the limitations people have. Some wouldn't choose to use a controlled method though even if they were offered. It would destroy too much of the 'magic' for them.