Alright, I'm willing to learn. Is the detail good for critical listening? With so many room reflections going on, it seems counter-intuitive.
I certainly don't feel in a position to teach you anything on the subject.
I'm mostly reacting to what was clearly based on a very narrow, personal opinion of what would fulfill the demands of "critical listening."
If it's of interest, I can just tell you why I found my omnis extremely rewarding for "critical listening."
I don't have a lot of experience listening to different omni designs - some at audio shows, and I think the Bang&Olufsen Beolab designs I used to hear at a local store were at least a wide dispersion design IIRC.
So I'm only talking about my experience listening to and owning the MBL omnis.
I hired an acoustician to help with the renovation of my 2 channel/home theater room. It's a beautiful sounding room - every speaker I've placed in the room tends to sound excellent, and I have some level of control over room reflections using curtains and some diffusion.
I started with Quad ESL 63 electrostatics in the 90's. I was intoxicated at first by the utterly boxless character of the sound and the sense of "transparency" seeing in to a recording space. Eventually I found the sound to lack punch and palpability, so I moved on to dynamic "box" speakers. Of course the ideal was a speaker that sounded as "unboxy" or "free of the box" as the Quads, but also had that density and punch to the sound - the sense of real dense instruments occupying space and moving air in the room.
The MBL omnis managed to combine those two characteristics. Totally and utterly "disappearing" as apparent sound sources, nothing at all hinting at boxy colorations, a more 3 dimensional sonic presentation than I've ever heard, and yet very dynamic, palpable and punchy. The combination of those hard-to-find attributes made for an increased sense of realism and involvement.
So a speaker that rewards critical listening to me (and most audiophiles) is one that rewards giving one's full attention to the sound/music. The sitting in the sweet spot listening thing, rather than listening to music in the background. What do I personally want out of such a speaker? I want the speaker itself to not be obvious as a sound source. I want the recording to be "free" of the speaker and to change imaging/soundstaging/acoustic space with the recording. I want a sense of air-moving density to the sound, so if someone is pounding away on a bongo or blowing on a trumpet, I have the sense of a dense instrument moving the air, more like the real thing. I want instrumental timbre to be highly distinguished - the metallic "blat" of a trumpet played hard, the sparkle of acoustic guitar strings and sense of a wooden body resonance beneath, the reediness of a reed instrument, woodiness of a wood block, metallic hard character of cymbals, chimes etc. Something that gets closer to the "surprising" character and variety I hear in real life. I want a sense of high detail that rewards my listening "in to" the recording. And I want all the production choices - processing of voices, instruments, choice of reverbs etc - to be revealed.
The MBLs did all of that for me.
Even just taking how they reproduced recordings of classical or acoustic guitars. There was an astonishing sense of "natural detail." By "natural" I mean detail more as I hear it in real life. So typically in reproduced sound I find speakers can sound very detailed, reveal the leading edge transients of guitar plucking vividly, but still sound harder and more mechanical, exaggerated. It's "a detailed recording." On the MBLs, the detail felt so fine, yet so perfectly integrated, that when listening to a good classical guitar recording, there was the sense not of "recorded detail coming through cones and tweeters" but simply the clear, warm, relaxed sound of human fingers plucking the strings. It wasn't 'in my face' detail, but, like someone playing in front of me, if I chose to I could listen right down to the texture of the "fleshy pad of fingers" on the strings. They just continued to blow my mind in such instances, given how regularly most speakers of my experience failed in that regard.
So, maybe I just had them dialed in really well in my room? I don't know. If someone says "I heard MBLs at a show and thought they sounded bad" I can just shrug and say "
Ok. I've actually owned them and that's not my experience." I can only relate how I perceived things relative to other speakers. The MBLs where almost the paradigm of "rewarding critical listening" in the parameters above. Doesn't mean they were perfect. I haven't heard perfect. But they had enough qualities to certainly keep my butt in the listening seat for hours on end.
