omnidirectional loudspeakers = best design available

[anmpr1]

The old ones were horns. Don't know about now, or if they're even being made.

The Ionovac used a horn. The Hill Plasmatronic did not. The Plasmatronic's helium tank was omnidirectional, in a cylindrical sort of way.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

The Ionovac used a horn. The Hill Plasmatronic did not. The Plasmatronic's helium tank was omnidirectional, in a cylindrical sort of way.

Wasn't ozone a hazardous byproduct of these speakers?

 

[Thomas Savage]

Because the omni adds so much of the acoustics of the listening room to the sound you hear the acoustics of the original recording venue on live recordings is swamped.
IME omni speakers are impressive and euphonic but the spatial information of the recording is completely hidden and largely lost and a wide deep artificial space imposed over it.
This does not matter with most recordings, particularly modern ones, since recordings made in a studio with a manipulated mix from multiple microphones has no true "recording venue acoustics" anyway.
OTOH the older recordings made in iconic concert halls using 2 or 3 microphones are not rendered accurately at all.
My own recordings (2 channel no manipulation) sound nice but certainly the acoustic rendering are nothing like the original recording.
Euphonic but inaccurate sound IME.
I rather like it nevertheless but high fidelity to the recording? No.

Its tough , listening is entertainment, or is it some puritanical pursuit where liking it less but knowing its correct is rewarding.

I dont know , personally I found listing to music indoors at home or in venues annoying ..., mostly .

Then I didn't, having dicked about and spend a wad.

Soon as you put instruments together and amplify them/ use sound reinforcement for me a problem is created. Omni speakers seemed like a plan to me but in fact they just pissed me off and irritated the crap out of me .

 

[Putter]

Such dodecahedrons are used for acoustic measurements like reverberation or excitation of reverberation chambers (we use them too at work), for example
https://www.muellerbbm.com/products/dodecahedron-loudspeakers/
https://www.nti-audio.com/en/products/ds3-pa3-tm3-noise-sources/ds3-dodecahedron-speaker
https://web2.norsonic.com/product_single/dodecahedron-loudspeaker-nor276/

and were even tried by some hifi companies in the 70s
https://www.hifi-wiki.de/index.php/Grundig_Audiorama_7000

but for me personally their very diffuse soundfield was never to my liking.

Design Acoustics D12 was a US product dodecahedron speaker. I would like to thank the OP. While his post was somewhat trollish, he stepped back and let the responses flow instead of repeating the same point over and over as has happened in some other threads.

 

[nerdoldnerdith]

I wonder how many people in this room have actually listened to a good pair of omnis...

I have the Morrison Audio speakers, and they sound phenomenal. They don't have many of the problems that omnis are supposed to have according to posters in this thread.

They don't accurately reproduce the acoustics of the recording venue for most music, but what they do exceptionally well is reproduce music as if it were being played live in your room. This is something that has to be experienced to really be appreciated.

Their imaging is palpable. The precision with which these speakers spatialize three dimensional information in the music is unlike anything I have ever heard from a pair of speakers. It's precise to the point of being able to discern individual keys on a piano and individual strings on a guitar. Whoever is saying that they would sound hazy and diffuse is flat-out wrong.

With the right kind of music these speakers are truly excellent. They're just not versatile and don't like to play loud.

 

[Shazb0t]

I wonder how many people in this room have actually listened to a good pair of omnis...

I have the Morrison Audio speakers, and they sound phenomenal. They don't have many of the problems that omnis are supposed to have according to posters in this thread.

They don't accurately reproduce the acoustics of the recording venue for most music, but what they do exceptionally well is reproduce music as if it were being played live in your room. This is something that has to be experienced to really be appreciated.

Their imaging is palpable. The precision with which these speakers spatialize three dimensional information in the music is unlike anything I have ever heard from a pair of speakers. It's precise to the point of being able to discern individual keys on a piano and individual strings on a guitar. Whoever is saying that they would sound hazy and diffuse is flat-out wrong.

With the right kind of music these speakers are truly excellent. They're just not versatile and don't like to play loud.

How can you read this thread and not understand that Omnis have no possible ability to reproduce most music as it's currently recorded with any sort of accuracy to the original performance? It's mind boggling.

The OP was an obvious troll repeating canned Omni misconceptions while calling us all "audiophools". He was basically a bad PR ad for Morrison Audio. That's the poor foundation that you're posting on. Let that sink in.

 

[krabapple]

QED? LOL.

Points for sheer brass, though.

 

[anmpr1]

 

[krabapple]

Perhaps the ones that Amar Bose actually claimed to design, the 901's? That seemingly only worked right when hung from a ceiling at a certain distance from both the ceiling and the wall?

Who ever said that?

 

[nerdoldnerdith]

How can you read this thread and not understand that Omnis have no possible ability to reproduce most music as it's currently recorded with any sort of accuracy to the original performance? It's mind boggling.

The OP was an obvious troll repeating canned Omni misconceptions calling us all "audiphools". That's basically the foundation you're posting on. Let that sink in.

I'm not going to get into an argument about this. All I am saying is that if you haven't heard a good pair of omnis then you're already in a bad position to say how they sound.

FWIW, no speaker should be able to accurately reproduce music as it was recorded, but our brains have a good way of sorting that out to recreate the illusion. Who's to say that our brains don't play similar tricks with omnis?

 

[dasdoing]

omnis are perfect......in the middle of a big dining table
when all those mini omnis came out it was the only aplication I could see

 

[krabapple]

Someone ranks on X. Someone else comes on and says, no way, I swear by X, you've just never heard X done right.

Rinse, repeat.
.

 

[bluefuzz]

How can you read this thread and not understand that Omnis have no possible ability to reproduce most music as it's currently recorded with any sort of accuracy to the original performance?

Nor can any other kind of loudspeaker (or headphone). When will people understand that the 'original performance' is a chimera. The original performance – if there is such a thing – is what comes out of the speakers in front of you, in the room you are in.

 

[nerdoldnerdith]

What omnis do better than any other speaker design IMO is incorporate the sound of the room into the music being played to create the illusion of live music being played in one's own room. This only works for certain recordings without a lot of room effects or added room effects already in them, i.e. recordings made in acoustically dead recording studios and mastered without any added reverb. These kinds of recordings wouldn't sound particularly lively on controlled directivity studio monitors in an acoustically controlled room where room effects are minimized.

What they don't do well is give someone a "window" into the recording and create the illusion that he is sitting in a concert hall for example. They can create a very convincing three dimensional hologram of sound, but they are not going to transport you to another place.

I wouldn't recommend them to anyone who is only going to have one system. They are too restricted in utility when it comes to the range of music we have available.

 

[anmpr1]

Wasn't ozone a hazardous byproduct of these speakers?

I recall how the designer, Dr. Hill, stated somewhere that the amount of triatomic oxygen generated by the speaker was negligible. I don't recall the good doctor suggesting that users listen with an open window, but I suppose that couldn't hurt. LOL

 

[Shazb0t]

Nor can any other kind of loudspeaker (or headphone). When will people understand that the 'original performance' is a chimera. The original performance – if there is such a thing – is what comes out of the speakers in front of you, in the room you are in.

If you're listening to music that was recorded in stereo or multichannel and then mastered with conventional speakers in stereo or multichannel, it at least makes sense to listen to it on conventional speakers in stereo or multichannel. You then have a chance to hear the artists intent. If you throw Omni speakers into the end of that chain it doesn't make any sort of logical sense to believe you will magically have "live music sound" or any other such nonsense. That was my point.

 

[LTig]

I'm not going to get into an argument about this. All I am saying is that if you haven't heard a good pair of omnis then you're already in a bad position to say how they sound.

Well, I listened to omnis (sorry, don't remember the brands) on Highend 2018 in Munich. They were all tonally so far off what I expect from a speaker (I do own only studio monitors) that I didn't bother to stay longer to detect any magic.

 

[anmpr1]

I have the Morrison Audio speakers, and they sound phenomenal.

I haven't heard his speakers, but Don Morrison is no fly by nighter, or astral traveling tweako. From what I know of him and have read, he is quite grounded. Don was responsible for a very low noise line level preamp and switching device (the ELAD), which made more than a few waves years ago. He is not a man whose ideas on audio reproduction should be discounted out of hand.

 

[More Dynamics Please]

Omnidirectional speakers certainly work well for background music in lobbies and waiting rooms.

 

[EJ3]

Who ever said that?

The local dealer at the time.

Many people had them hung in precise locations like hanging plants.

About 6 years ago my wife & I were 60% owners of a Karaoke Club in Guam and she had bought some industrial BOSE speakers on stands. She did not like the sound compared to a set of speakers (which ones, I don't know I was not on Guam at the time) that she took from our home to compare them to. She relegated the BOSE to the VIP room & used our home speakers for the main room. (When I did come home on weekends, I was to busy to be checking what she had hauled to the bar). The speakers that I was using on the main home system where my Dahlquist 905's and it wasn't them, so I wasn't concerned.