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Stereophile July 2025
Let’s see what the boys are writing about this month. But first…
Tariffs
P3 addresses the topic of the tariffs and how they are affecting our biz. Kudos to Jim Austin who hits the nail right on the head.
Tariffs have damaged our business. I’ll repeat, DAMAGED.
We ordered Bryston from Canada regularly. They have been our friends and outstanding biz partners for 40 years. Here’s what happened with a February order.
By the time the gear was ready to ship in a month or so, tariffs were on/off/up/down per day! Bryston was afraid to ship due to impending tariffs. They finally shipped June 1. We received the gear via DHL without incident. Then on June 10 we received an invoice from DHL. It was a 25% tariff hit, PLUS some ancillary costs. The customers paid the Feb prices and picked the gear up before we received the fancy DHL invoice.
The horse is long out of the barn and we are STABBED IN THE BACK. Other shipments are in cue. Will tariffs be assessed? Like the DHL tax?! It’s not just confusing. Adding 25% to pricing is untenable and pernicious.
The best I can say is, it’s a malicious mess. I never thought my own government, who needs me to stay in biz to pay taxes to them, would throw me a boat anchor instead of a lifeline- but here we are. It’s hard enough to run a biz well. And now we’re saddled with trying to navigate through this madness and associated costs.
They who know nothing of what we do would say, sell something built in America. Let’s analyze this. Which American company builds Bryston level electronics and speakers and backs them with a 20 year warranty?! Yeah, I’m waiting for the answer. There is NO equivalent supplier to Bryston. We can’t “drop in” XY or Z. And again I’ll point out, I’ve been selling Bryston for 40 years. Our government has no right to RUIN our biz and relationship with this unique supplier who we have partnered with for FOUR DECADES.
*Tom Fyne writes about creating lists of folk singers on Tidal to share with his buddies. The theme for his get together with friends for the night was this array of singers. That’s a perfect use for streaming. Create your playlist in advance and be ready to play and discuss. Smart man!
*Masimo sold its hi-fi brands to Harman. Ya have to wonder why a medical company bought a bunch of hi-fi brands for $1B to begin with. Three years later they sold em all off for $350m. Looks like they had no idea what to do with this tiger after they captured it.
*Gryphon of Denmark opens its own showroom in LA. Have you seen Gryphon’s pricing? Someone from Masimo must now be with Gryphon.
*Stereophile points out that Castle speakers of Britain are back, designed by Karl Heinz Fink, Castle’s top designer from its hey day. They’re GREAT. We have ‘em.
*A writer is excited about headphone amps for $13k and $9k. They have tubes, which a speaker within a gnat’s arse from your ear, will tell you by hissing.
*They like the new tonearms from Sorane, $1500 plus. They’re especially good with the new Ortofon MC90x cart, $5500. This pairing is actually dirt cheap by Stereophile’s standards!
*My experience with Pathos of Italy was sheer disappointment. Cheap build, worst volume control in history and way over priced. This new integrated is $55k. When I look inside, no way.
*Audio Note has a new 8” 2-way Field Coil speaker for $65k per pair. This is utter insanity.
*A new Quad preamp and power amp combo are reviewed. The elderly Englishman writing this review keeps referring to Quad of the 60s/70s. Why? These two new “Quad” pieces are made in China, simply to LOOK like the fashionable, classic Quad gear. There is no relationship to Quad of the UK other than to look sorta kinda similar. The same OEM that makes this Quad gear make dozens of other brands under the same roof. Pricing is reasonable because it’s made at practically slave labor rates in China. Don’t fall for the venerable brand name. Please check out Atoll of France-that is actually MADE IN FRANCE, by a family owned company instead of a job house.
*The writer is impossible for me to stomach. He points out that this new $12,500 preamp is bargain basement pricing because his two “reference” preamps are $75k and $150k. Looking at the list of his ref stack of gear, probably lands around $2m. Sheeze.
*A new VPI table for $5850 looks well built and fairly priced. I’m impressed that it’s a belt drive with floating suspension- probably very good and American.
*P109 features a free, whole page advert, for all intents and purposes, for the mono brand Gryphon store in LA. It will be appointment only. You don’t want riff raff when your table runs $150, your CD runs $45k and you have a power amp for $100k that weighs 445 lbs. Fans will be knocking down the doors to get in…
*Lastly, P114 discusses in detail the issue of master tapes from back in the day and how they’re treated, and turned into CDs. It’s a well written article raising plenty of questions/concerns. Worth reading.
$2k Speaker Landscape
If you start shopping for speakers at this price point, you’ll probably Google, “Best Speakers for $2k.” What comes up?
In alphabetical order the most common brands are: B&W, Dali, Fluance, GoldenEar, JBL, Kef, Martin Logan, Monitor Audio, Wharfedale.
What do all of these have in common? They’re all made in China and have big advertising budgets. Most of these are made by job houses that make a plethora of brands. In fact, several of THESE are made in the same house, as you can derive from their similar design. It’s like looking at the same golf shirt with different logos.
I’m not saying these speakers are BAD.
I am saying we can do better- and not support Chinese job houses in the process.
Let’s get better sound, with superior reliability AND support a family owned company who builds with TLC in Canada.
Please consider Bryston/Axiom. These two family owned Canadian companies were once separate entities. They merged some years ago and the company is simply called Bryston. Bryston is the banner used for their higher end speakers with 20 year warranty. Axiom is the less expensive line with 5 year warranty.
Axiom M60, $1900 Per Pair
{37.5h, 9.25w, 15d, 48 lbs, 92dB SPL, 8 ohms, 10-250 w/ch}
Black Ash, Walnut, Boston Cherry
The best alternative to all of the above Chinese imports is the Axiom M60.
M60 is a fanny kicking 3-way that will rock your world. The bass is deep and hefty, yet defined. The $2k speakers from China are flimsy in comparison.
M60 uses a Titanium tweeter. It sounds smoother than aluminum or mixed dome construction. The midrange and woofer drivers are constructed of contiguous Pure Aluminum. The Chinese use paper or woven fiber for the most part. They’re big on running sandwiches of drivers, using one material glued to another. Bryston much prefers its Pure Aluminum which won’t suffer from annoying buzzing or distortion from mass produced sandwich drivers that weren’t made just right.
M60 is Steinway Smooth on top. The Chinese are invariably tuned BRIGHTER to grab your attention. This is no accident. Axiom is more accurate in tonal balance for acoustic instruments like pianos, guitars, violins, and most importantly, the human voice.
Let’s address the bass first. M60 goes down to 36Hz within 3dB, and will move the floor boards in your living room. M60 use two heavy 6.5” woofers with a legit 3-way crossover. The Chinese speakers listed above will barely reach 50 Hz, regardless of their advertising claims. They’re big on sandwich drivers with small magnets, configured in a 2.5 way (instead of real 3-way) design. We have seen these speakers actually measured in mags like Stereophile and British hi-fi News. The $5k offerings from these Chinese guys rarely touch 45Hz.
What this means to your music is that M60 will deliver the impact of a big drum kit or stand up bass. M60 will allow you to feel the lowest register of the piano so you can appreciate what LVB wrote in the magnificent Pathetique piano sonata.
The logical question would be, how does Bryston/Axiom accomplish this while far richer and better known companies do not?
On the R&D side Bryston has some advantages over the big names. In addition to having its own anechoic chamber to work with every day, Bryston has a secret weapon. That weapon is its 100 foot tall tower in the countryside. An anechoic chamber only allows a designer to measure down to
about 90Hz due to the boundaries of the room. Below 90Hz the designer is basically working with his educated guess as to what’s happening. That’s OK. But Bryston is PRECISE. In the R&D stage of every model in the Bryston/Axiom family, that prototype is run up the tower. It is measured down to 12Hz without the limitation of room boundaries. Bryston can see exactly how the speaker performs down to lower than we can hear. This allows Bryston to attain deep bass while remaining taut all the way. This is a tool the rich guys simply don’t have.
Bryston makes its own drivers in house. Each driver has to pass a battery of 8 tests before being moved on. The Chinese just screw drivers into boxes as quickly as they come off the line.
The benefit of Bryston’s TLC is first of all, richer & more powerful bass. Bass is the foundation of music. When you hear M60 you’ll appreciate it right off the bat. You can’t miss it. Along with that more powerful driver array comes increased reliability.
Bryston/Axiom’s imaging is outstanding. Because the L&R speakers measure virtually identical in performance, a centered vocal is striking to behold. It’s like viewing your world through glasses of an accurate RX vs… being in the neighborhood.
The QC efforts guaranty a mellow rather than acerbic midrange/high end. Steinway is the world’s favorite piano for its timbre. Let’s appreciate it through a clear window instead of through colored glasses.
Bryston has trickled down the technology it uses to make its high end speakers, which are some of the best values on the market. Axiom models have become the beneficiary of this work. Please visit to hear M60 in person- the old fashioned way to shop for speakers!
New Axiom Tower Speakers
Back in 2009 James Tanner, Bryston’s CEO, had designed a speaker he dubbed The Model T, for Tanner.
James needed a speaker capable of full range, big time power and better dynamics than other financially attainable towers at the time. James’ goal was to have some Model Ts built for Bryston’s R&D facilities to help them better design electronics.
James reached out to Ian Colquhoun, who owned Axiom. Axiom had been making speakers down the road a piece for 30 years that it sold at bargain prices direct to the public. James hoped that Axiom might be willing the build a few Model Ts to his specs. Ian is an agreeable guy and said yes, sounds like fun- this little Bryston project.
The Model T is a much bigger, more powerful beast compared to anything Axiom had made. For example, Model T was based on three 8” cast frame woofers, each of which was 5.5” deep and weighed 15 lbs! The finished Model T is a 108 pound tower. Axiom had never built anything close as it focused on the blue collar buyer.
When these new Model Ts reached the Bryston factory, they blew the engineering team away. James got big kudos for creating speakers that would allow Bryston to hear things they hadn’t heard before. Three pairs were immediately put to work. At this juncture, James thought Bryston’s relationship with Axiom was complete.
Well… there was that pesky recession in 2009. Does anybody out there still remember how March 9 changed the world?
Companies like B&W and Kef, who dominated the upper crust speaker market got their teeth punched in over night. Orders across virtually every business were canceled as the stock market tanked. The audio biz was hit especially hard. We know a custom cabinet maker who saw almost $3m worth of orders canceled within 24 hours. His biz was flushed within 90 days as the house of cards came down. It was very sad, especially because it was mostly due to mortgage deception nation wide.
Speaker companies that were making products in Europe and N America could no longer sell real quantities of speakers. Their orders were onesies- few and far between. Pricing virtually doubled as this played out.
The boys at Bryston started thinking… Since B&W, Kef and the other guys who were dominating the sub $10k market almost DOUBLED in a flash, perhaps this auspicious Model T might just step right in and find support in the market place.
Bryston had Axiom do a short run of Model Ts and guess what? The market saluted! Model T found a welcome home in the audio culture instantaneously with its huge performance and 20 year warranty. They made wonderful sounding, powerful speakers and weren’t interested in long production runs that could get them into speculative trouble.
Audio Emporium, among other dealers, found customers who were delighted to buy this BIG BOY tower with major league power and dynamic range characteristics- at LESS money than what was driving the biz just a short time before.
It wasn’t long before James expanded the T series, based around his work on the Model T specifically. Shortly thereafter, James created the A series that revolved around 6.5” woofs instead of 8s. Within a couple short years Bryston was contracting Axiom to make a plethora of high performing speakers. The relationship was so successful that the companies merged and is now simply called Bryston.
Axiom’s construction know how and efficiency allowed Bryston to get into the speaker business. Bryston’s engineering expertise created the Bryston lineup, and is now enhancing Axiom’s speakers as well.
Of course James nailed down his Bryston Ts and As first. He has since augmented these lines with the company’s premier range, the T10s. With this work finished, Bryston is focusing its expertise on the Axiom lineup. New models have been coming into the line in the past six months or so.
If you check our recent newsletters you’ll find a dozen or more Axiom models that have been introduced, benefiting on this relationship with Bryston. At long last I’ll get to the point of THIS missive, which is to introduce two exciting, affordable, muscular Axiom towers.
Axiom Models
The goal is to make Axiom speakers sonically competitive with Bryston at significantly lower price points. By dissecting every detail of the design, James ultimately found that he could achieve much of Bryston’s sonic refinement while sacrificing mainly power limits. If you love the Bryston sound but don’t need the sports car top speed, Axiom is a perfect fit.
Axiom models are similar to Bryston models in many ways, but don’t have quite the bass or power handling capabilities that Bryston has. The drivers, crossover components and cabinets used in Axiom models aren’t as robust as Bryston. But for customers that don’t demand the muscle that Bryston produces, Axiom provides an outstanding alternative for much less money with a 5 year warranty.
Doubles
These two new towers are based on Bryston’s “doubles” blueprint. Each model uses a pair of tweets, mids & woofs. Well, M100 uses three woofs. M80 uses a pair.
The purpose of running doubles is multi-fold. Doubles allow much higher power handling. Doubles produce a taller, wider sound stage. You’ll be pleased, and surprised, by just how massive and spacious the soundstage is with Bryston and Axiom speakers running the doubles technology. There’s the added benefit of higher efficiency as well.
Tanner introduced the doubles in the big dog Model T at the beginning of Bryston’s speaker journey. He further implemented it into the Bryston models A1 and A2, with great success soon after. We have sold truckloads of A1s and A2s over the years. And by the way, they are all still under warranty to the original buyers. M80 and M100 are the same sizes as their Bryston brothers. They just don’t pack quite the punch.
Axiom M80 Towers, $2300 Per Pair
{39.5h, 9.25w, 17d, 63 lbs, 4 ohms, 94 dB SPL}
M80 runs PAIRS of drivers. Think of M80 as a Bryston A2 “light.”
You get a pair of Titanium tweets, a pair of 5.25” Pure Aluminum Mids and a pair of Pure Aluminum 6.5” woofs.
Freq response is 34-20kHz, +/- 3dB. You’ll find Chinese built towers for $5k don’t even come close in the bass.
Efficiency is a surprisingly high 94dB. Axiom impedance graphs are friendly, a world easier than the Chinese for example.
Axiom M100 Towers, $3000 Per Pair
{47.5h, 9.25w, 17d, 81 lbs, 4 ohms, 92 dB SPL}
M100 adds an additional woofer in a larger cabinet with a more sophisticated crossover.
Think of M100 as a Bryston A1 “light.” M100 has more air, space and power than M80.
Freq response is 31-20kHz +/- 3dB. Once again, you’ll find $6k Chinese towers that die at about 50 Hz. They’re no match for M100, much less the Bryston A1.
Efficiency is a very manageable 92dB. M100’s impedance graph shows it to be a breeze to drive. The Chinese competitors are a roller coaster of hiccups for your amp to navigate.
Axiom Vs Kef
Axiom M60, $2000 per pair: 37.5h, 9.25w, 15d, 92 dB, 8 ohms
KEF Q11 Meta, $2200 per pair: 44h, 12.5w, 15d, 89 dB, 4 ohms
Let’s compare two speaker candidates that are asking for your vote at about $2k per pair.
Where Are They Manufactured?
Axiom is owned by Bryston. Bryston & Axiom drivers and speakers are made in their own house in Canada. With production and QC done in house, you’ll always get what you’re paying for.
Kef is owned by Gold Peak Group, a Chinese company that has been on the Hong Kong stock exchange since 1984. Their main business is making zillions of batteries with a special interest in rechargeable batteries. GPG also makes Kef & Celestion speakers- in China.
Cabinet Size
Axiom’s M60 is a fairly petite tower that hits like a middle linebacker.
Kef’s Q11 is 6.5” taller and 3.25” wider. It’s a LOT larger.
M60 has deeper bass, despite being a smaller speaker.
Drivers
Axiom:
Two 6.5” Pure Aluminum cast basket woofers
One 5.25” Pure Aluminum cast basket midrange
One 1” Titanium tweeter.
The mid and woofer cones are made of contiguous Pure Aluminum.
Axiom’s Titanium tweeter uses its dual chamber design to usurp rear wave reflection.
Kef:
Three 6.5” Paper woofers coated with aluminum film, stamped baskets
One 4” Uni-Q stamped midrange basket with a 3/4” aluminum tweeter.
The 4” flare is less extreme than the prior model and claims to have less horn like color.
Kef claims its MAT disc behind the tweeter has 25 absorbing channels to usurp rear wave reflection. They have pages and pages on their site about it. Below is a photo of the MAT disc. To believe that this tiny plastic disc creates magical results and behaves like a 2 chamber tweeter is a real stretch.
The advertising department is pouring a lot of Kool Aid on an insignificant, flimsy piece of plastic. Bryston doesn’t do that. For example, Bryston/Axiom speaker ports have Vortex flutes to avoid chuffing. The Q11 has a traditional wide, circular port that you could drive a bus through. This provides less controlled bass response. While this is indeed a difference… Bryston just mentions its Vortex ports, they’re not purveying them as revolutionary technology, as Kef does its MAT disc.
The Numbers
M60’s efficiency is 92dB.
Q11 is rated at 89 but when tested by Brit hi-fi news (3-2025) measured 86.3dB.
One watt plays M60 at 92dB
To get Q11 to play at 92dB you need four watts. BIG DIFFERENCE. Q11 needs four times more power to get where you want to go.
M60’s impedance curve is a dream. It barely goes below 6 ohms for a split second as you’ll see on this graph.
Q11 is rated at 4 ohms. Hi-fi news measured 3.16 ohms 96Hz to 900Hz, with a dip down
to 1.2Hz at 99 Hz. Given its challenging impedance and moderate efficiency, the Kef is much more difficult to drive.
M60’s frequency response is 36Hz-20kHz, +/- 3dB.
Q11 claims 44Hz-20kHz, +/- 3dB. Hi-fi news tests show -6dB at 55Hz. They recommend placement near the wall to get deeper bass. To be fair, Kef may have made its claim with the speakers near the back wall. Bryston measures its speakers on a 100’ tall tower with NO room boundaries to augment the bass.
Sound Performance
The M60 has a Steinway Smooth sonic flavor with a kick like a mule. Its mid and bass drivers are contiguous Pure Aluminum. Kef, like most everyone else, uses a combination of materials (aluminum film glued to paper) for its drivers. The sandwich construction is a compromise for transmitting audio signal, compared to the contiguous aluminum Bryston/Axiom uses. The sandwich design is swimming with your boots on. Hi-fi news reports that the Kefs have a “down tilted, bass rich response.” That’s polite lingo for presenting your music with a dark-ish, muddy skew.
M60 presents an excellent image and broad soundstage. Given the precision of Bryston/Axiom drivers, they sound like you’re wearing glasses with a precisely accurate prescription. Placing is very flexible. M60 doesn’t need persnickety placement to generate deep bass.