It seems a few if any here have heard a surround system with high-quality omnis. A few people have though:
Michael Fremer reviewed an MBL surround system for Sound And Vision:
Home theater often doesn't allow such placement specificity since your screen or display location is probably fixed, particularly if your theater is in your living room, which is my situation. So rather than placing the 116s where they might work best, they were placed where every speaker has...
www.soundandvision.com
Since I have found Michael Fremer’s descriptions of loudspeakers I’m familiar with to be quite accurate, and having owned MBL speakers myself (he describes their character very well), I don’t have much doubt about the experience he reports here:
Some quotes:
Before we get to tonal balance, dynamics and the like, let's get one thing clear: throw away any superlatives you may have read about other speakers' abilities to create "acoustic bubbles," "seamless three-dimensionality" and the like.
Nothing I've heard through the years comes close to what these mbls produce in terms of space, "acoustic bubbles," " three dimensionality", "seamlessness" and other oft-written surround sound criteria. The sound was
everywhere and coming from
nowhere. Yet when image specificity was called for it was
there, where it belonged.
…….
The presentation of this recording by these mbl speakers was dramatically open, unforced, non-mechanical, "the floor has fallen out, the ceiling gone and the walls have disappeared" transparent, and both expansive and appropriately contained in a supremely well-defined acoustic. The REL subwoofer's contribution to the visceral bottom end shouldn't be overlooked. But it is the mbl's speed, transparency, purity, and omni-directionality which produces a sound both location-less and image specific, depending on the needs of the program material
………
In fact that's what this system did better than any other surround system I've heard, and as good as the big mbl 101 was in a two-channel setting. The Radialstrahler's omni-directional advantage really made itself felt in a multichannel system. No matter what the visual distractions in your room, even with the lights on, you can stare at the speakers and hear
nothing coming out of
any of them, yet the immersive illusion of reality is startlingly real.
……
Despite the center channel's unfortunate height, dialog was as natural, unforced and easy to understand as I've heard here. Male voices were free of chestiness and female voices never sounded thin, shrill or overly sibilant unless the recording was. Aside from its subjectively ideal tonal balance, the 111RC never "sounded." As with the other channels, the vocal images simply floated like a holographic bubble, with solidity and form but not with identifiable edges or etch. Whatever the measurements might show, the observational sensation was of tonal effortlessness and believability.
…….
Panned effects moved fore and aft, side to side and diagonally with unrivaled seamlessness and specificity. As far as sonic envelopment helping one to get "into" a movie, no other surround system I've heard comes close.
……..
Otherwise, this mbl system set a new surround sound standard in my home theater. Its overall performance, both tonally and especially spatially for both movies and music, was in a league of its own, and by a wide margin.