Omnidirectional speakers. The future?

omnidirectional is without a doubt the best kept secret in home audio. shahinian,allison,gradient,and ohm and a handful of others are still the closest thing to the real thing from bottom to top. they will always be a cult item because they are out of step(and hard to design)with what most hi enders want.

sean...To be precise, the wavefront generated by the original Ohm speakers is cylindrical, rather than spherical.
Lack of vertical dispersion is a good thing when the speaker is used in a room with ceiling and floor to make reflections, and is a characteristic of line arrays, and of the ubiquitous MTM driver configuration. Even so called "planar" speakers resemble line arrays because (Quads excepted) they are taller than they are wide.

More on point sources...the musical instruments are not points, but the microphones that make the recording are. I regard the microphones as "sampling" the planar wavefront of the original sound. Now, when you play back the recording using a point source loudspeaker, the loudspeaker sound radiates outward again forming a spherical (planar) wavefront. However, with a point source speaker the radiation process starts over again from a point, with SPL falling off rapidly with distance, whereas a planar speaker generates the wavefront as it exists at a distance from the source where it has already expanded, and so there is only slight variation of SPL with distance from the speaker.

Speakers of all descriptions can sound good in certain situations (even horns and ported boxes). In fact I have even heard the original Bose speakers sound pretty good with the right setup and kind of music. There is more than one way to skin a cat, which we all agree is a good thing.

As I see it progressing we'll be able to construct whole rooms that can transmit sound from any location to any location and only to that location. That way multiple listeners from any point in the room will hear the same as any other. Supermarkets are already working on part of the technology. What they do is have one speaker with very limited dispersion beam sound only to a specific location and only someone at that location can hear it like in front of the taco section and you hear an ad. Not sure I'm explaining it sufficiently to do it justice. But imagine what a movie might sound like with a whole room that is the speaker(s).

Fine posts, all. I designed my first speaker system as an omni (vertical-radiating planar?) back as a teen in the late 60s, using a Utah triaxial driver sitting upfiring into a plaster-filled kitchen funnel mounted in a wooden "basket", the whole thing sitting atop a 90 lb clay suwerpipe! Yikes. Antiresonant, anyway. A couple of visits to Tweeter, Etc. caught me hearing the new small Mirage Omni-whatevers. My gosh what horrible sound. The sales staff at both locations hate 'em too. Sigh....
I proposed to a good friend/master acoustician the idea of collaborating on an omni-design someday, and he asked why? as they don't work right in normal living rooms. Can't remember his primary concerns (maybe indeed the "primary" early arrival/reflections summation stuff). Happy Holidays all.

Sean- I think Richard Shahinian would have constructed a pulsating sphere type loudspeaker if he had the technology. I agree that the greatest problem with current omni drivers are the lack of high spl ability and limited dynamic range. Shahinian chose to deal with this shortcoming by using conventional dynamic drivers arranged so as to mimic the sphere. I have not detected the lobing problems you mentioned. I don't understand why you think the Bose 901's are as much omnis as the Shahinians. Doesn't the 901 radiate sound forward and back only?
Eldartford- I don't think of musical instuments as being a point source for sound. A vibrating guitar string has sound waves emminating from the entire length. At any given point along the string, the sound would radiate in all directions from that point wouldn't it. Richard said he adopted the theories of Stuart Hegeman. Does anyone know exactly what those are? I would like to read more about this if I could.
Jrd351- agreed