Omnidirectional speakers. The future?

Sean, can you please tell us what you think are the top 5 best speakers on the market today and why you think each speaker on your list is exceptional. This is not meant as a flame, it's just a matter of intrigue. It's obvious you have a lot of knowledge in this area and your recommendations could be of value to myself and others on this board.

Thanks,
DB

DB: Making such a post would both be useless and deceiving. I've haven't heard 10% of all the speakers out there, so my comments would be quite limited in scope and a dis-service to many manufacturers and readers of this forum. Suffice it to say that there are very few commercially designed speakers in stock form that i think are built as well as they should be or perform as well as they could. The fact that not one pair of speakers that i own ( and i have over a dozen pairs ) are stock should tell you something. Sean
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Hi, I saw your post about Omnidirectional speakers.
I had to tell you one thing. I found the holy grail of how to get omni directional sound with detail.
I originally had the Mirage M1 speakers in 1993.
They were the big bipolar speakers.
They definitely had a 3 dimentional sound. But I felt they were to warm sounding and lacked detail. I then got the Carver Al 3 speakers. These were dipole ribbon speakers with a 10 inch woofer. I really liked these speakers. They had an open sound and the bass was really good.
Then at the Stereophile show in 1996. I walk in the HSU room. All of a sudden I hear the most airest sounding speakers with a great bass response.

I look to see what speakers HSU was using. He was using these cheap bookshelf speakers called RA Labs. He did something interesting, that I would have never thought of. He was using 4 bookshelf speakers. Each bookshelf speaker had a 6 1/2 midbase and the tweeter. He was using 4 of these bookshelf speakers.

The 4 bookshelf speakers were basically back to back. 2 of them were facing the wall. The other 2 were facing foward. He was using a Yamaha 4 channel amp. He was using a HSU sub on the 4 bookshelf speakers. I think this is a genius idea. You had to hear the sound. It had that 360 degree sound with nice detail. The bass was really good. Now you cant do this with deep speakers.
But with bookshelf speakers or tower speakers that are not to deep, you can do this.
Check out these tower Fried speakers. You couldn't use 4 of these speakers. There to deep. Here's a pic.
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/ces2004/saturday/

But with these Tyler 7U tower speakers. You can use 4 of them. Here's a pic.
http://tyleracoustics.home.mindspring.com/taylo.html

I'm telling you, this idea gives you that 360 degree sound with detail and great bass. Thats what i'm doing with my system.

I'm using 4 Dynaudio 1.3 speakers. These are bookshelf speakers with a 6 1/2 Dynaudio midbase and tweeter. I'm using 2 Meridian 557 amps, Adcom 750 preamp and Tara Labs cables. I'm using a Velodyne HGS 12 sub. You got to hear the sound. 360 degree sound with detail and nice bass.

Twilo: The "RA" in RA Labs stood for Roy Allison - see my post at the top. I don't know if it was Dr. Allison himself who displayed those speakers in that back-to-back set up, but in any case, he didn't invent the configuration, as many hobbyists have played around with it through the years, often using similarly inexpensive small speakers. The opposed-twinned set up is not a cure-all, but it does let one investigate bipolar sound without needing special speakers.

Zaikesman, HSU set up the system. What I can tell you, when I had the Mirage M1 speakers, they were definitely laid back with an airy sound. But they were to warm sounding and lacked detail.
When you use the back to back setup, you get that 360 degree sound with nice detail. It definitely sounded much better then the Mirage Bipolar speakers I had.
But I'm convinced the back to back setup is the best way to get the omni directional sound with detail and a good bass response.