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Are MBL omnidirectional speakers worth the $$$?

Now I don't really know which model you mean. Here are the ones produced:
View attachment 404513
The homepage has English text, but if you select it, you miss the pictures of the speakers:


Anyway, Stig Carlsson more or less abandoned the omni idea, you could say. New times, new ideals of sound or what it was due to, I don't know. His last model OA 52.2 was not omni in the slightest. This one:
View attachment 404514
In an interview in the 1990s, Stig Carlsson said that of all the 1970s models, he was most satisfied with his OA12.
OA12 is still popular.:) 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:
View attachment 404515
A bit omni with them you could say. Or rather, a little different than a traditional two-way speaker.
Right now, the latest kit with SB Acoustics SB17NRX2C35-8 bass drivers them. They would be fun to listen to.:)
Shows my ageing memories from 1999 era... They were the top model from the 80's I recall, so maybe OA6s then? I could swear they had four tweeters and th ebox was taller than the 5, which seemed to be very popular among afficionados of the brand.


(Shuffles off, meaning well but getting old with increasingly useless memories)
 
Do you attend live acoustic concerts? If so, are you able to point unequivocally at an individual instrument?

Yes, I find that live music often “ images.”
But of course that’s going to depend on what type of live music and my orientation to that source of sound. Obviously, the further away you are the more the sound is going to glom together and seem to occupy closer to the same spot. But if I’m seated not too far from a live jazz band where I can hear the unamplified sound of the instruments, then I can usually easily point to each instrument.
(since I live in an area where I constantly encounter live bands playing, both indoors on the street and in parks, I often do this test, closing my eyes).

I’ve likewise found the same even at Symphony Orchestra, but then I tend to like to sit in the closer seats to the Orchestra. People who choose seats further back to get more of a hall blend to the sound likely experience less distinct imaging.

Because I do, and I can't. I find conventional stereo often presents instruments in a way that I find to be overly localized compared to the real thing.

There I agree with you. One of the characteristics that I find separate the sound of real instruments in real space versus what I hear reproduced on stereo systems, is that there is a greater size and bloom to both the instruments themselves and the acoustic around the instruments. In contrast, the instruments and voices through loudspeakers often sound like they’ve been put through something of a gravity-squeezing black hole, in which they’ve been constricted down to smaller points sources of sound.
 
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In my own system, I have two sets of speakers that fall outside of the "forward lobe with controlled directivity" paradigm…

I wouldn’t say NHT 3.3 is outside the paradigm. For its day it comes as close as anything IMO. With the small mid it’s pretty consistent until the tweeter narrows. Sure, the cabinets have toe-in built in.
 
I wouldn’t say NHT 3.3 is outside the paradigm. For its day it comes as close as anything IMO. With the small mid it’s pretty consistent until the tweeter narrows. Sure, the cabinets have toe-in built in.
Toe in plus an absorber on the outside edge. They are not making anything like the laterally symmetrical polar pattern pointing straight ahead that has become a paradigm. Speakers that are specifically designed for stereo and account for psychoacoustic processing of the acoustic crosstalk probably would look pretty poor on the standard mono-derived measurement.
 
Toe in plus an absorber on the outside edge. They are not making anything like the laterally symmetrical polar pattern pointing straight ahead that has become a paradigm. Speakers that are specifically designed for stereo and account for psychoacoustic processing of the acoustic crosstalk probably would look pretty poor on the standard mono-derived measurement.

I don’t really see it. I don’t think there’s any obligation that the design axis be straight ahead. NHT 3.3 certainly fits the paradigm of flattish and smooth on axis and smooth off axis. It’s also a monopole.
 
Do you attend live acoustic concerts? If so, are you able to point unequivocally at an individual instrument?

Because I do, and I can't. I find conventional stereo often presents instruments in a way that I find to be overly localized compared to the real thing.

I think we need to talk a bit about phase coherence and proximity, and what MBL speakers are actually doing. There is a difference between sitting at row 20 of a performance of a Mahler symphony:

1731124451303.png


... and a Schubert lieder recital in a small room where you may be sitting a couple of meters away from the performer:

1731124695251.png


The difference is what David Griesinger called "proximity", which is the loss of phase coherence the further you get from the sound source. He called the distance where this happens the "Limit of Localisation Distance", or LLD. Within the LLD, phase remains coherent, you can easily localise the singer, and there is exceptional clarity. Beyond the LLD, reflections cause the loss of phase coherence, and phase becomes a jumbled mess. We are no longer able to localise the sound source except for a vague "it's in front of you".

In the former scenario, you are well outside the LLD and critical distance CD, so reflections predominate. When I was younger, I worked as an usher to gain free access to performances so I stood at the back where there was hardly any direct sound. I was already an audiophile, and I remember thinking that my system sounded better than a live performance. It was muddy as heck and just crap. I thought that live performances were nothing to write home about until I attended a particularly memorable performance. My then girlfriend, a pianist, accompanied a singer in a practice recital at her home. The clarity was exceptional and you can pick where the musicians are as surely as you can pick someone speaking in front of you.

MBL speakers and all omnis flood the room with reflections, as noted by both Toole and Linkwitz in my earlier post. It will surely cause loss of phase coherence, even if the recording had it in the first place. So it has an uncanny ability to create a "you are there" impression of a live symphonic performance. But if you give it a well recorded Schubert lieder, it also transports you from the front row seat to the 20th row by destroying phase coherence.
 
The difference is what David Griesinger called "proximity", which is the loss of phase coherence the further you get from the sound source. He called the distance where this happens the "Limit of Localisation Distance", or LLD. Within the LLD, phase remains coherent, you can easily localise the singer, and there is exceptional clarity.

Which makes sense. In evolutionary terms, our hearing wouldn’t be nearly as advantageous if it couldn’t localize the position of sounds, especially nearby sounds it could be posing dangers, or that are important to us. So the idea that real acoustic sources don’t localize or image because we are talking about musical musical instruments doesn’t really make sense. That’s why I say it boils down to particular listening scenarios, rather than broad generalizations about “ live music doesn’t image with any precision.”

MBL speakers and all omnis flood the room with reflections, as noted by both Toole and Linkwitz in my earlier post. It will surely cause loss of phase coherence, even if the recording had it in the first place. So it has an uncanny ability to create a "you are there" impression of a live symphonic performance. But if you give it a well recorded Schubert lieder, it also transports you from the front row seat to the 20th row by destroying phase coherence.

I would grant you some leeway for rhetorical exaggeration there. But it still doesn’t seem to describe very closely my own experience. As I’ve said, I found the omnis to image and soundstage pretty similar to my conventional loudspeakers. It could be the case sometimes that the imaging could seem a little deeper behind the speakers, but if so, not by a great deal.

And I also found the Omni responded to room reflections and a similar way to my regular speakers. This is in a fairly small room, 15’ x 13’ - but when I would allow my room to be very reflective, there was more of a “ they are here” effect, a very “ live in the room” feeling, and cutting down reflections created more of a “ you are there” effect with the recorded acoustic dominating? But in either case imaging was still pretty comparable to my conventional speakers in terms of identifying positions and spatial relationships of the instruments.
 
Shows my ageing memories from 1999 era... They were the top model from the 80's I recall, so maybe OA6s then? I could swear they had four tweeters and th ebox was taller than the 5, which seemed to be very popular among afficionados of the brand.


(Shuffles off, meaning well but getting old with increasingly useless memories)
Then it might be OA14 you're thinking of:
9137521459_9beff847b1_b.jpg
How popular were omni-style speakers in England during the 1970s-1980s? I found an interesting page where among a Tannoy model was brought up as an example:
Screenshot_2024-11-09_091052.jpg

Screenshot_2024-11-09_092514.jpg

It doesn't have to be half a century ago. One might also wonder how popular omnis are these days for those who use home cinema systems?:)
 
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How popular were omni-style speakers in England during the 1970s-1980s? I found an interesting page where among a Tannoy model was brought up as an example:
I would suggest a decade or so earlier.

My Hi-Fi Year Books of the years between 1962 and 1976 list very few omnis. In the days of mono (before stereo radio) when my dad was buying Quad mono amps and a single corner-placed dual-concentric Tannoy speaker, I was building an omni speaker using a concrete drain pipe fitted with an upwards-firing 10" driver with a conical reflector above - a design found in one of Gilbert Briggs' (of Wharfedale) books on loudspeakers - and very like the illustrated Tannoy model. Next I built a copy of the Wharfedale 6-sided Airedale system, with forward-facing 15" bass and upwards-firing mid and top. Again this was originally designed for mono playback, but I modified the driver placement to all forward-facing drivers when I built the second Airedale. Stereo at last!

Perhaps omnis are generally are a legacy of mono days but adapted for stereo, and offer certain advantages over other types while also suffering disadvantages as described by myself and others.
 
I would suggest a decade or so earlier.

My Hi-Fi Year Books of the years between 1962 and 1976 list very few omnis. In the days of mono (before stereo radio) when my dad was buying Quad mono amps and a single corner-placed dual-concentric Tannoy speaker, I was building an omni speaker using a concrete drain pipe fitted with an upwards-firing 10" driver with a conical reflector above - a design found in one of Gilbert Briggs' (of Wharfedale) books on loudspeakers - and very like the illustrated Tannoy model. Next I built a copy of the Wharfedale 6-sided Airedale system, with forward-facing 15" bass and upwards-firing mid and top. Again this was originally designed for mono playback, but I modified the driver placement to all forward-facing drivers when I built the second Airedale. Stereo at last!

Perhaps omnis are generally are a legacy of mono days but adapted for stereo, and offer certain advantages over other types while also suffering disadvantages as described by myself and others.
Interesting DIY. Appropriate for the time it seems.:)

There is probably a lot in what you say, legacy of mono. About a century or so ago in monotimes, of course then omni might have been something. However, nowadays with music recorded in stereo and meant to be played in a normal listening room, then omni is probably considered an anomaly. Or?

An anomaly that in and of itself apparently some people like. Nothing wrong with that, but it must still be considered coloring the sound, or exaggerating to create a "big sound"? If I were to make a counterargument, I would then ask. What is this coloring, the exaggerated, the artificial? It is still not a live sound (if we stick to live music with actual physical musical instruments) but a reproduced sound we are talking about. If reproduced via HiFi solution is a sound, music that is still not "authentic" or the real thing why bother trying to get it "authentic"? After all, it is impossible to make it become the real thing. :oops:
(for example just take the difference in dynamics live vs music via..any top notch HiFi, High End system)

Edit:
It probably results in people getting to try things out and see what fits, what they like.:)
An OT rant: Which is the funny thing about HiFi. That there are differences. Think, impossible but imagine it, if HiFi only consisted of a DAC. That would be damn boring. All new cheap as well as expensive DAC's are basically completely transparent and they are impossible (in properly performed blind tests) to distinguish. Amir's speaker tests are fun to read, even if you don't need new speakers. His tests of DACs on the other hand are, well, ...not. They may serve their purpose of putting an ok stamp on them and for those looking for a new DAC but other than that, nop (at least for me).
 
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Getting back to one of Toole’s comments cited earlier:

“With multichannel recordings or tasteful
multichannel upmixing of stereo material omnis cease to be advantageous.”


This is obviously true in many respects, and Toole explained why.

My only disagreement is from a practical standpoint. I find it much easier to optimize certain aspects of a sound presentation I’m going for, via two channel speakers, than from surround. I like to start from being fairly close to the sonic plane of the sound, for instance my two channel speakers around 7 feet away sometimes less. And from there sounds can feel “ closer” to me when they are mixed upfront to the plane of the speakers, and the sound staging and imaging from that point stretches wide and deep, with a finally rendered sense of space and images layered with precision in that space. I find that to be a certain type of immersion that is very engaging.

And generally speaking I think it’s easier to set up a two channel system that way then it tends to be for a surround system. That’s the case with my surround system and every surround system I have ever encountered.

So if I just take my surround system, yes, I’m surrounded more sonically, but lots of action in the front plane is starting from well further back from me.

What I have yet to hear any surround system of my experience do, is to effortlessly beam down performers into the room with the level of precision, coherence, and three-dimensionality of my two channel speakers, let alone my MBL omnis when I had them.
I’m including in that every surround set up I’ve ever heard - at my place, anyone else’s set up, in stores, show demos, and including the multi million dollar mixing studios I am familiar with in which we create discrete surround mixes. Do those examples have some advantages over the MBL Omnis as those Omnis performed in my room? Of course: the ability to truly surround the listener. Scale, dynamics, not suffering some of the timber problems of stereo, etc.
But again, none of them have ever carved out a sense of imaging and holographic space, and a “musician playing right there!”
as precise and regularly convincing as I experience with the two channel system.

The point is, as I’ve made before, in an apples to apples comparison of similar quality loudspeakers, in which one has free reign to place with total optimization, then I would expect to choose the surround presentation as better. For instance I would imagine a full surround set up using MBL speakers would be mind blowing.

I have a great set of Home Theatre speakers, among my favourite all time dynamic speakers, and sometimes I listen to music just in stereo on that system too. But there is an apple to apples comparison where I can switch between stereo and surround on the same set up, and which the advantages for surround are easy to hear.

But I’m able to set up my two channel speakers and a more precise way, and that means that my two channel system can produce an even “ better” sense of realism and immersion in some respects compared to my surround system.

So yes, in principle, and all things held equal, a two pair of Omnis wouldn’t hold advantage over a great surround system.

But in practice, they can definitely hold some advantages over what it takes to achieve some of the same performance aspects in a surround system. In my experience.
 
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I think we need to talk a bit about phase coherence and proximity, and what MBL speakers are actually doing. There is a difference between sitting at row 20 of a performance of a Mahler symphony:

View attachment 404828

... and a Schubert lieder recital in a small room where you may be sitting a couple of meters away from the performer:

View attachment 404829

The difference is what David Griesinger called "proximity", which is the loss of phase coherence the further you get from the sound source. He called the distance where this happens the "Limit of Localisation Distance", or LLD. Within the LLD, phase remains coherent, you can easily localise the singer, and there is exceptional clarity. Beyond the LLD, reflections cause the loss of phase coherence, and phase becomes a jumbled mess. We are no longer able to localise the sound source except for a vague "it's in front of you".

In the former scenario, you are well outside the LLD and critical distance CD, so reflections predominate. When I was younger, I worked as an usher to gain free access to performances so I stood at the back where there was hardly any direct sound. I was already an audiophile, and I remember thinking that my system sounded better than a live performance. It was muddy as heck and just crap. I thought that live performances were nothing to write home about until I attended a particularly memorable performance. My then girlfriend, a pianist, accompanied a singer in a practice recital at her home. The clarity was exceptional and you can pick where the musicians are as surely as you can pick someone speaking in front of you.

MBL speakers and all omnis flood the room with reflections, as noted by both Toole and Linkwitz in my earlier post. It will surely cause loss of phase coherence, even if the recording had it in the first place. So it has an uncanny ability to create a "you are there" impression of a live symphonic performance. But if you give it a well recorded Schubert lieder, it also transports you from the front row seat to the 20th row by destroying phase coherence.
I want a speaker amp combination that automatically corrects phase, equalizes, controls directivity and adjusts volume on every track and every type of music I play.
Getting back to one of Toole’s comments cited earlier:

“With multichannel recordings or tasteful
multichannel upmixing of stereo material omnis cease to be advantageous.”


This is obviously true in many respects, and Toole explained why.

My only disagreement is from a practical standpoint. I find it much easier to optimize certain aspects of a sound presentation I’m going for, via two channel speakers, then from surround. I like to start from being fairly close to the Sonic plane of the sound, for instance my two channel speakers around 7 feet away sometimes less. And from there, sounds can feel “ closer” to me when they are mixed upfront to the plane of the speakers, and then be in the sound staging and imaging from that point backwards, to extremely deep beyond the plane of the speakers. I find that to be a certain type of immersion that is very engaging.

And generally speaking I think it’s easier to set up a two channel system that way then it tends to be for a surround system. That’s the case with my surround system and every surround system I have ever encountered.

So if I just take my surround system, yes, I’m surrounded more sonically, but lots of action in the front plane is starting from well further back from me.

And I have yet to hear any surround system of my experience do, is to effortlessly beam down performers into the room with the level of precision, coherence, and three-dimensional of my two channel speakers, let alone my MBL omnis when I had them.
I’m including in that every surround set up I’ve ever heard at my place anyone else’s place in stores, demos, and including the multi million dollar mixing studios I am familiar with in which we create discrete surround mixes. Do those examples have some advantages over the MBL Omnis has those Omnis performed in my room? Of course. Again, the ability to truly surround the listener. Scale, dynamics, not suffering some of the timber problems of stereo, etc.
But again, none of them have ever carved out
a sense of imaging and holographic space, and a “musician playing right there!”
as precise and regularly convincing as I experience with the two channel system.

The point is, as I’ve made before, in an apples to apples comparison of similar quality loudspeakers, in which one has free rain to place with total optimization, then I would expect to choose the surround presentation as better. (for instance I would imagine a full surround set up using MBL speakers would be mind blowing.)

I have a great set of Home Theatre speakers, among my favourite all time dynamic speakers, and sometimes I listen to music just in stereo on that system too. But there is an apple to apples comparison where I can switch between stereo and surround on the same set up, and which the advantages for surround are easy to hear.

But I’m able to set up my two channel speakers and a more precise way, and that means that my two channel system can produce an even “ better” sense of realism and immersion in some respects compared to my surround system.

So yes, in principle, and all things held equal, a two pair of Omnis wouldn’t hold advantage over a great surround system.

But in practice, they can definitely hold some advantages over what it takes to achieve some of the same performance aspects in a surround system. In my experience.
I am again going to audition some large MBL next week, I will keep in mind all the various responses to this post on omnis, and yours in particular. Keep in mind that I am not in the market for the larger model, and the small models don't impress me much.
 
I want a speaker amp combination that automatically corrects phase, equalizes, controls directivity and adjusts volume on every track and every type of music I play.

I am again going to audition some large MBL next week, I will keep in mind all the various responses to this post on omnis, and yours in particular. Keep in mind that I am not in the market for the larger model, and the small models don't impress me much.

Cool. Omnis sound different enough that if they don’t ring your bell, they don’t ring your bell. and ask before they do seem sensitive to room and set up.

I absolutely loved my time with the MBL’s and wish I didn’t have to sell them. But in the end I did make a choice towards a more conventional speaker, one that gave me some of what I liked in the MBL’s but also which sounded a bit more conventional with the type of music I grew up with. This could be simply having been conditioned to conventional box speakers for most of my life. I don’t know.

But still, nothing I’ve had did quite the particular magic act of the MBL’s.
 
I want a speaker amp combination that automatically corrects phase, equalizes, controls directivity and adjusts volume on every track and every type of music I play.

I am again going to audition some large MBL next week, I will keep in mind all the various responses to this post on omnis, and yours in particular. Keep in mind that I am not in the market for the larger model, and the small models don't impress me much.
Beolab 90s, you will have to adjust volume though, and good for parties.
Keith
 
Beolab 90s, you will have to adjust volume though, and good for parties.
Keith
it would be really great if you moved on from this point. You've made it already so repeating it again and again is not moving the discussion forward at all and only dragging the quality of the discussion down.
 
Theta wants variable directivity, that’s exactly what the 90s can offer, one of the modes is omni.
Keith
 
Beolab 90s, you will have to adjust volume though, and good for parties.
Keith

it would be really great if you moved on from this point. You've made it already so repeating it again and again is not moving the discussion forward at all and only dragging the quality of the discussion down.

This ^
 
Theta wants variable directivity, that’s exactly what the 90s can offer, one of the modes is omni.
Keith
And the omni modes of Beo 90 is not a high quality implementation of omni directional design. Even BeoLabs's engineer know this fact and try to cover it with the "recommendation" that it is for party mode.
 
This is probably as close to a true omnidirectional design, commercial ones only omni in horizontal axis.
Keith
 

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