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The first and most obvious is cost: By eliminating middlemen and selling direct, a company like Axiom can offer speakers at more affordable prices. Another advantage is the home audition: Axiom and many other Web-based companies offer a 30-day trial period. (The initial shipping cost is free, although Axiom makes you pay the return freight if you choose to pass.)
In this case, you can also take comfort in Axiom's longtime involvement with the speaker-measurement and psychoacoustical research programs at the National Research Council of Canada. This government-sponsored program is partly responsible for the many excellent speaker brands that have emerged from Canada, including Energy, Mirage, Paradigm, and PSB (see this issue's review of PSB's Synchrony speakers). If you require some kind of objective seal of approval for speakers, association with the NRC is about as good as it gets.
I was pleasantly surprised by this system's sleek and stately looks. The angled front corners and tapered cabinets of the Millennia M80 v2 towers and the VP150 v2 center speaker provide a slimming effect that's visually appealing, and the look is echoed by the QS8 v2 surrounds' angled front baffles. Build quality is excellent: Cabinets are solidly constructed and furnished with gold-plated binding posts. The towers come with both spikes and rubber feet for carpets or bare floors. My system had an attractive Mansfield Beech finish with black grilles, although other options are available.
The M80 tower - a 40-inch-tall, three-way design - has a pair each of 6.5-inch aluminum-cone woofers, 5.25-inch midrange drivers, and, unusually, dual 1-inch titanium tweeters, with the second tweeter present to beef up the M80's power-handling and dynamic capabilities. There's also a pair of bass ports located on the back.
So, this article was posted three and a half years ago, and not a single person has noticed or commented on the fact that the first paragraph repeats 4 times. Doesn't anyone proofread this site?? I'd have thought that maybe Al Griffin, being the author of the piece, might have stopped by at some point to check to ensure that his article was posted properly. Personally, I gave up trying to read the article as I just got too frustrated.
I guess no one from Axiom cares about the article either as I'd expect they would complain about it if they knew how messed up it is - funny thing is: they have a link on their site to this very review.
I wonder if anyone will even notice my comment here, let alone actually fix the article... I guess we'll just have to wait and see...
Apologies...we should probably hang up a "Pardon our Appearance" sign while we're in the midst of a large cleanup project, but we'd hoped it'd be more-or-less invisible.
Here's an explanation (and it has nothing to do with Axiom or the author not caring). We've just finished a major revision of the site (which for some of these older articles means they've hopped frameworks at least twice, if not three times now); during such projects there are inevitably some problems porting over things that originally designed to display on older versions of this site. We're making our way through slowly and fixing whatever we find that's malfunctioning, but given the scale of things we haven't gotten back this far yet.
Thanks for your understanding.