Rare Breeds

As well as some real mainstreamers, the dudes at Axis Distribution also deal in some really lovely non-far-Eastern-built rarities. We are talking mad-end audiophilia and some of the most specialised speakers in existence anywhere. From multiple-world-wide award winning and review trouncing components to a single twelve inch woofer used to make over 158dB in a small hatchback car on its own!

 
Starting out as Clif Designs the company has since been called CD Technologies, then was simply re-named CDT Audio. Always based in California and always with amazingly high performance speakers, their cast purple chassis look lovely and when they get reviewed by the golden-eared they do tend to come first and win review groups. Mine own included in the past on other magazines. The set of awards that have been won by designer Kenneth Pearson’s products are so numerous that CDT are now a bit blasé about things, not really bothering to make a big deal out of it all. A bit like captain Kirk, the brand has a lot of citations.
Oddly enough, they not only sound awesome, but I gather they are also kind of more rugged than you would expect. Whether this is because you can hear the clarity cutting through I am not sure but I can reveal that the famous loud person known as Firestarter after his one-time VW Camper fire engine with 150dB+ of audio in it, is a major fan of CDT speaker components. Despite monster bass kicking at them and a huge appetite for spanking the living crap out of speakers, they have survived in Geoff’s installs a treat. Since ‘Firestarter’ Geoff is a genius who can literally see sound in air like Keanu Reeves was eventually able to see the Matrix, this is quite an endorsement.
The skill for designing natural-sounding speakers is Ken’s gift. They come in three ranges on a Good, Better, Best basis, going up in price, of course. It starts with the Classic range from £70, up to £300 and includes coaxials as well as component systems. The HD or High Definition series is comprised solely of component systems and starts at £400 and goes up to £800. Their top end line is called the Eurosport or ES line and begins at a lofty £700! It goes up to a reassuringly mad-end £2,000.
With the HD and ES lines, it is a menu a la carte as you choose the size of midbass and HF units from a selection of 7/6/5/4/3/2 and 1 inch drivers. The two is a lovely wee midband to high frequencies laminated dome and is a bit special as it can go all the way down to 500Hz, so obviating the need for one whole crossover point. It’s all very posh and deeply lovely. You tend to select a three way system from this range, too, which puts the complexity and so cost up. 
 

 
Another west coast (L.A.) based outfit, the Tru Tech guys are no-compromise audio amplifier nutters. They have brought a whole world of features and design ethos from the very best home audio and simply applied it to car audio. How about the same devices to actually amplify that are used in posh home hifi?

Not simply output transistors on legs on a bit of substrate, but posh metal-canned ones with the round bits that are used to stick out of very high end home hifi amplifiers. Tru Tech do just the same thing.
However, that’s the very least of it. How about an amp with a choice of preamplifier sections on special panels you plug in or out of the end of your amp? Like straight-direct connection when you use a line driver, or a simply mad-end solid state type or craziest of all in a car but somehow just gorgeous, a pre-amp with valves, just like the flat earth audiophiles and crazed guitarists rave about? That’s the Copper series.
They too use a Good, Better, Best system to make and sell their wares. Their entry level(!) kit is called Steel. The next up is the Billet line and their best stuff is that Copper series.
The Steel kit comprises two amps and will not be out until November. Both will cost a cool half grand and there is a four channeller and a monoblock. The Four channel’s design is such that when bridged it will act like a dual mono as each pair of channels has its own power supply. Rated at 4 x 65w RMS it goes to 2 x 200w RMS when bridged and is genuinely biased to work best into a two, not four Ohm load.

The S500 is rated as a half kilowatt amplifier.
Even more gently bonkers than Rockford-Fosgate (and that’s saying something) they rate their amps not 25% to 30% less than they actually achieve, they only rate them at 50% of what you actually get. Thus the 500 watt S500 Steel amplifier will drop a kilowatt.
The Billet series is where those sexy TO-3 metal-canned output devices feature and they are the only 12V amp company to use them. Preamp, power amp and power supply are all on totally separate boards inside and you can upgrade to a Burr-Brown preamp if you wish. They begin at £780 and go up to £1,100.
The Copper series use Kimber cable in its insides and is pure high end hifi audiophilia. These come complete with all three choices of preamplifier boards as described above. They can use a Cat 5 wire for input and they start at a cool £2,000.
Next year there will be four channel amps in this line and full on valve output ones, too. It’s a very high end line indeed. 
 

 
All hand built, as sometimes evidenced by the odd glue sprue trail, the Atomic line of speakers has an incredibly wide spread from merely potent all the way up to utterly insane weapons-grade products designed to break world records for loudness. In fact at the recent European decibel Drag Racing championships, Axis’ Chris Woods did a count up and found more winners from all across Europe were using Atomic woofers than anyone else.

A proper maker of speakers in their own factory, rather than being designers who get stuff built for them, they also make speakers for lots of other brands, most notably in recent years the Treo brand. As used by one John Henry to totally smash the world record for absurd loudness a couple of years back. He got famous but Treo never came over to Blighty. Atomic most certainly is here. I recall doing a joyfully entertaining (for me anyway) death and destruction test where we simply piled watts into subwoofers until they died of it. I blew up a slew of woofers that day but no matter what I did, I simply hadn’t got enough wellie to hurt the Atomic. The resulting review actually caused a small cult following at the time, paving the way for the huge SPL competition success the brand enjoys in the UK today.
I gather there is a video on the web somewhere of one of their best woofers plugged directly into the US mains at 50Hz, 92A and some equivalent 19 kilowatts! The perpetrator then cuts out the coil to show you it isn’t burnt afterwards, which is mad. Although they do make subs, amps and speakers, it is their crazed subs that they are strongest in. Their top end SPL competition woofers are said to be good for ‘burps’ of up to 35 thousand watts.
Their woofers come in a ‘Retail’ range and also a Competition range which are all configured for each user. The retail stuff comprises the Energy Series as entry level, the Manhattan range as their middle stuff and Quantum line as their best sound quality product. Above that they do the Apocalypse thousand watt subs. All are less than £300 and apart from Apocalypse can be had in eight to fifteen inch sizes.

In a world with subwoofer lines called, Punch, Kicker, Thump, and even Earthquake, what do you call your most insane woofers? How about ELE? It means Extinction Level Event. Like the Yucatan peninsula meteorite now widely accepted to have brought about the end of the era of the dinosaurs. Not just an assault or a seismic event but something that can wipe out the world. It’d have to be pretty bloody hard to live up to its name but the ELE stuff is truly extreme. Made primarily for SPL contest use, they can be re-spidered for Street bass use. You can have them in 0.7, 1.0, 1.4, 1.8 or 2.2 Ohm dual or quadruple voice coils, in a choice of four different baskets and three different motor configurations as well as their being divided into XX and XXX ranges and a selection of six or more different arrangements of bottom spider suspensions. The number theory works out at over 1,400 different engineered monster subwoofers that may be configured to be just right for your competition need, no matter how extreme.
This little red Panda I saw in dB Drag made 158.3dB with an APXX12 with dual 0.7 Ohm voice coils on two 4,500 watt amplifiers at once. This is heavy stuff.
Atomic, for the rare breed fan who loves handmade and right out there. It isn’t all highly priced but it does go All The Way! 
 
– Superb quality speaker components with worldwide acclaim
– Car amplifiers made to very high home hifi standards
– Modular, interchangeable high end pre-amplifier sections in TruTech
– Valve preamplifiers
– Hand built bespoke choice of over 1,000 options of competition Atomic subwoofers
– Industry-leading levels of technical knowledge and support from distributor 
 
Customer support telephone number 0870 350 2460
http://www.axisdistribution.co.uk