Thanks. Though, I’m sure a number of us (including me) were familiar with Toole’s comments on Omnis, for those who haven’t seen it, it’s good stuff.
Here are some quotes of Floyd Toole who even owned and enjoyed loudspeakers with close to omni radiation pattern:
Yes, it’s good to note that, as we can see from what Dr. Toole wrote, He wasn’t using such speakers merely for parties, but for critical listening enjoyment. Even choosing them out of blind testing against other designs!
I think there is a lot of interesting stuff to unpack here:
“Recordings are not made with omni monitors, so their use is that of an embellishment - a "sound effect" that in some situations and with some program compensates for limitations of stereo. With multichannel recordings or tasteful multichannel upmixing of stereo material omnis cease to be advantageous.”
“ sound effect” is of course Dr. Toole’s personal choice of a descriptive term here.
But I think it’s worth pointing out that one could take the term as dismissive and derisive, and therefore not truly appreciate what an Omni can do, or you can understand it in terms of how an Omni influences the sonic presentation. As Toole points out an omni can compensate for some of the limitations of stereo. Sounds like a good thing, and it’s clear Toole himself thought so enough to purchase the Mirage speakers.
He points out this can be advantageous in some situations/program material? But… what type of material and why? Toole seems to reference his mirage speakers acting like an orchestra in a pleasing way. What this speaks to I think is that Toole, like many listeners, seems to enjoy a sense of openness and spaciousness to sound, versus a tight constricted quality. But why this preference? It has often been associated (including by Toole IIRC) with a more “ natural” sensation of sound.
Why is this?
Because in our normal every day, experience of sound sources, we are typically inhabiting the same space and acoustics as that sound source - where we are in a small room with a person speaking or an instrument playing, a large room, a hall, or outdoors - we are immersed in the same acoustic as what we are listening to. We are quite familiar with “ real sounds occurring in real acoustic spaces.”
And most stereo reproduction doesn’t sound like that.
Given even the most accurate speakers, set up in the usual listener triangle, many if not most recordings will sound quite artificial. Given all the weird warping of perspective of voices and instruments and even acoustic spaces that comes from using various microphones at various angles and whatever has been done through the mix, what you are getting the sense behind the speakers an entirely different acoustic space is occurring from the room you are also aware you are sitting in. You may very well enjoy the characteristics of recording, but it’s very much a recording, and the sense that you are peering through a portal to a sort of artificial and deformed acoustic presentation separate from the one you were actually sitting in.
This is where designs like Omni and dipoles, etc can have an advantage. They can engage room reflections (among their advantages) in a way that can sound more natural, less constricted, and more like “ sound sources In real acoustic space.” That’s often I think why people first experiencing a big dipole panel speaker can have a “ wow” moment in terms of how the sense of acoustic space seems to open up and “ breathe” more naturally with the room you are in. And this more natural sounded spatial presentation seems to be what Dr Toole found pleasing with the mirage speakers, with the implication, it was orchestral music most of all. Which makes sense.
So while there maybe scepticism about claims of an Omni or point source being the ideal for replicating everything perfectly accurately, I think there is good reason to think that they are doing *some things* that re-create some of the character of real sounds in real acoustic spaces, that aren’t so easy for other designs.
And that’s one reason why the description “ sound effect” could be taken the wrong way as the presumption of a purely artificial sounding result, when it can actually be the opposite: a more natural sound, in some respects.
(Respects in which Toole hold can be done better in multichannel).
So what about the limitations implied in Dr Tooles comment, in which the advantages of an omni are good for specific program material? Well this seems to be somewhat of a subjective call, where the discernment of
“ Which tracks sound better and why” our left up to the preferences of the individual (as Toole suggests).
Having owned the MBLs, I did not find their advantages, particularly restrictive. Certainly that “ out of the box” and “ real instruments occurring in real acoustic space” sensation worked really well with orchestral music.
But it also worked well with most other music I listen to. If the sensation of orchestral instruments and real acoustic space is more more pleasing, why wouldn’t the sound of a single acoustic guitar and vocal in a folk recording also benefit? It did. The sensation of the musical occurring in more natural acoustic space was just as pleasing, and to be more real sounding, as the orchestral work.
And what wouldn’t be pleasing, if freed from the sense of “ coming from a box” and sounding more like occurring in natural space? It didn’t matter what I was listening to: drums, sax, piano, voices, or even totally electronic music using sequencers and synthesizers (as I’m a big electronica fan).
The sensation of sound sources occurring in free acoustic space was pleasing pretty much across-the-board. So I did not find the Omni presentation “ only good for the occasional type of program material.”
Then there is a question of “ accuracy” and things like image accuracy, or precision with an Omni.
First, it’s obviously true what Toole says: that music is not typically mixed using Omni speakers. But to me, once again, I would want to be careful how far to take the implications. Do Omnis just totally screw up the sound of a mix? Again in my experience, absolutely not!
I had my MBLs at the same time as I had all manner of other speakers that I owned or that came through my house for evaluation. Sometimes I would have the MBL’s along with seven other loudspeakers or so, switching them all in and out as I pleased.
I found that the general characteristics, in fact, very specific characteristics, of the recordings of mixes stayed very consistent when I switched between the MBL’s and the many other conventional speakers. It’s not like suddenly. I couldn’t hear things in the mix, or that in terms of the recorded acoustic, Imaging, spatial relationships of images in the recording, etc. Suddenly changed. No everything was still in its same place. Rather, there was just a more natural and “ open” sense to the overall presentation. A guitar 4 feet behind the speakers panned slight to the left, in its own reverb would be there just as it was with the conventional speakers, only it just seemed to hang in space somewhat more naturally, with a sense of space carved around it even more distinctly.
And when it comes to “ diffuse imaging” once again, this is going to come down to degrees, and also how the speakers are implemented in a listening set up.
People seem to often imagine one scenario, where an Omni is just plant down in a live room so you get this really obvious “ splashing of sound all over the place” in some artificial manner.
I had my MBLs in a room that was more on the dead side, and in which ceiling reflections where controlled for and I could control quite a bit of the wall reflections to taste.
I found that in my implementation, the imaging of the MBLs was comparable to the conventional speakers in terms of imaging placement and precision. Image outlines a teeny bit softer in some cases? Perhaps in some cases, but subjectively far from all cases. All in all, I got a great deal of imaging position from the MBLs. And man could they “beam in” a performer to the room (or into a recorded acoustic space) like crazy.
Vocalists could appear “ right there” where you can point directly at them between the speakers just like many conventional speakers, except again there was this “relaxing” and “ opening up” of the acoustic space, such that the performers seemed to be more naturally inhabiting real acoustic space. The overall effect sounding incredibly real, as far as stereo can manage. I demo the MBL’s for a great many guests, and virtually all of them found naturally recorded vocal tracks fairly shocking in realism, which I doubt would be the case if the speakers were blowing up somebody’s vocal image in some unnatural way.
And as I said before, not only did I fool some guests with the MBLs that a real instrument was playing (from outside the room), when I did some of my own live versus reproduced comparisons, the purported disadvantages in the Omni design did not stop them sounding pretty much more like the real thing than I have heard elsewhere. (that included also playing recordings of my son and wife’s voice, playing them back on the Omnis, and having them stand in the same place to compare their real voice. The MBLs held up quite well)
This is why, from my own and experience carefully setting up MBL omnis in my own room, I have perhaps a bit of a different perspective about their strengths and weaknesses, versus those who have not lived with them.
There are upgrade kits for them, drivers, crossovers and so on. Same box and placement of drivers as the original. Then they look like this:
