www.linkwitzlab.com There's been some recent discussion of these speakers on this forum, and darrenyeats in another thread asked for my impressions of them. I'm in the process of acquiring a pair, and once I get them set up I'll review them here.
I've heard two sets of Orions, both with the most recent revision (a rear-facing tweeter). They're pretty close to perfect dipoles throughout the frequency range. One characteristic of dipoles is that the power in the radiation falls off faster with distance than for monopoles. As a result I expect that they excite room modes less than standard box speakers (which are close to monopoles at low frequencies), but that in the higher frequencies they produce a higher ratio of reflected sound to direct sound (since tweeters are pretty directional). It's interesting to walk behind a pair of Orions - the sound changes, but much less so than for conventional speakers. They use extremely high quality (and expensive!) drivers, which gives them a mid and high-range clarity that equals or exceeds the best I've ever heard. Perhaps the lack of resonances in the box (since there isn't one) also contributes to that. And the bass is unique - I've simply never heard anything like it. It goes quite low, with a lot of impact (each speaker has two ten-inch drivers). But, unlike a subwoofer, it's smoothly integrated into the music. In fact across the spectrum the integration is nearly perfect - it's very hard to hear transitions from driver to driver even on very challenging material. In short, they're the best speakers I've ever heard in my life, bar none. The only serious competition was a pair of $50,000 MBLs, and even for those the bass integration was inferior. Obviously one's impressions of these things are colored by the musical material, the room, your mood, etc. However I've burned a reference CD of recordings I know very well and listened to it on many high-end systems (I recommend anyone auditioning speakers do the same), so I have as good a basis for comparison as possible. I should add that both pairs of Orions I heard were in acoustically good spaces. When I get my pair set up (in maybe 2 weeks), I'm curious to see how they perform under much less than ideal circumstances (in my rather live 16X19X8 living room, where they can't really be much more than 3 feet from the back wall). -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38593 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
