Here is the email I got from Steve Deckert. It tells the whole story better than I would ever dream of. I reproduced his blurb without asking permission, so I hope I'm not infringing on his copyright!!!
The New Omega Loudspeakers
A breakthrough in low mass high speed loudspeaker design
It’s no secret to those who are familiar with Decware’s SET amplifiers that Omega loudspeakers are a good match. You read about it over and over again in all the audio forums. Over the past many years I can recall literally 100’s of phone calls involving the pairing of Decware amps and Omega loudspeakers. Despite selling our own high efficiency loudspeakers for the past 15 years, I have pointed customers who’ve called me about Decware speakers towards Omega speakers when I thought something in the Omega line would be a better fit for a given situation.
You might think this is odd, but it simply comes from customer feedback and getting to know Louis from Omega. The feedback is substantial if not overwhelming and like myself, Louis is more interested in furthering the art than he is the pocketbook,.. so being on a similar page he has come to fit into the family rather well, if not by complete accident.
Our speaker line follows a creative path that exploits the potential of multiple speaker designs that we find to work well with our amplifiers. The goal is and has always been to find affordable ways to let you hear the inner beauty hidden in our amplifiers… inner beauty only able to be fully appreciated on high efficiency, low mass speakers which we offer in great variety.
We’re not interested in “good, better, best” marketing strategies in the choices we make for interesting loudspeakers to offer. This includes our own speaker designs which follow no apparent design patten other than efficiency. In fact, when our cabinet maker’s obsession and expertise with the radial driver pushed the sound quality of our Radial speakers up a whole plateau and subsequently inspired him to to create his own hybrid design, the HR-1, well it was so good we had to carry it.
Recently we did the similar thing with another small manufacture who makes an open baffle for under $500 that is simply overwhelming good. I know of nothing for the money that will touch it. We decided to add it to our line of speakers this year and sales have been great.
When it comes to Omega loudspeakers, based on our own customer feedback representing the entire Omega line, I would have been happy to carry any of the models, so you can imagine the surprise when I was informed that Louis was working on a brand new loudspeaker design just for the occasion!
This new speaker (under I imagine some pressure to be exceptional) has stepped up to the plate in a big way. Ironic for such small drivers… it’s just been hard to wrap my head around this new speaker. For someone who lives this stuff nearly seven days a week for the past twenty years, I only have one other speaker that I have ever had any problem wrapping my head around within a few weeks if not hours. This is one of them.
For starters, it has four inch drivers in it. There are two drivers per cabinet. One of the two drivers is low-passed with a high quality inductor somewhere around 500 Hz which makes a lot of sense.
What is particularly puzzling about this speaker is it’s efficiency. These new speakers are actually around 99 dB with 1 watt! That means that the raw 4 inch drivers have to be around 96 dB by themselves and if not impossible must certainly be extremely rare. Now, if you take into consideration that the drivers are achieving bass response in this cabinet well into the mid 30’s ( just based on listening…) you quickly come to realize that this should be impossible.
To have a 4 inch driver be 96 dB efficient with 1 watt typically means that you have a mid range driver at best with very little if any mid bass. To go into the mid bass region and maintain this efficiency would be impressive enough, but to go below that by a full octave is just ridiculous. Yet it’s happening.
After chatting with Louis about this, he informed me that the cone and surround for this 4 inch driver is only 1.5 grams. To put this in perspective, the average 15 inch woofer has a moving mass of 80 grams or more. A 10 inch woofer typically used in todays hi-fi speakers of all price points, is about 50 grams. A soft dome tweeter is closer to the 1.5 grams… so you can start to put two and two together here and see that a full range driver, i.e., one that does the treble, midrange, mid bass and low bass, that comes from a 1.5 gram cone is going to have the speed of a tweeter and yet some how be more efficient and go 8 octaves lower is proof that the Audio Gods like Louis. : )
The closest thing in speed I’ve ever heard to these speakers are my full range direct coupled high voltage electrostatic loudspeakers, which are interestingly the other speaker I mentioned having trouble wrapping my head around. The common denominator of these two speakers is speed. My Acoustat’s actually have about the same 1.5 grams of diaphragm weight giving them similar characteristics from a speed perspective.
The speed of either speaker is completely disarming. You don’t ever get used to it. Basically these are like a pair of headphones for your listening room… and the dynamic resolution across the scale is dumbfounding… at least to these ears. It is a speaker that gives a Decware SET amplifier the dynamic explosiveness usually only heard in super high power systems with enormously large speakers. I heard a vintage Zen Triode amp have that leading edge attack of a current day Zen Mystery Amp that boast 20 times the power. The new UFO Zen’s are almost over the top with resolution… you’ve been warned. : )
That brings me to the size, which is ideal. It fits into the family of speakers on the web page without stepping on any toes, and is large enough to kick a little ass, yet small enough to be non-dominating in even smaller rooms.
The burn-in period I estimate to be between 100 and 500 hours depending on the resolution of your gear and room, as well as perhaps your choice of recordings. These speakers are a high resolution microscope on the music, source, amps and cables. From a speed standpoint, they are essentially like speakers that don’t exist leaving you with the almost honest truth as your room distorts it, unlike headphones that will eliminate much of the damaging effects of poor room acoustics. I mention this so you understand that this is a speaker with the resolution of a headphone located in your listening room, so some attempts must be made to make the room half way smooth sounding, and the audio gear must be well above average sounding.
With your ducks-in-a-row, as alluded to above, these speakers will undoubtably set a new benchmark for resolution. I have to stop again and say that in 20 years of looking for 4 inch high efficiency full range drivers I have never found anything on the planet that goes lower than 50 Hz on a good day, with more sensitivity than about 91dB.
The 4 inch drivers in these well executed cabinets are truly rare and memorable in what they do with a zen amp at 99dB. In fact, so much so, that even if you didn’t like the sound you would still demo it to your friends because they have performance that simply can’t be discounted or ignored.
Watch for this speakers to appear on the Decware web site in early 2016. Price is under apparently under 3K.
I want to leave you with this thought; Imagine having a pair of speakers in your listening room tonight… and each one contains only a single pair of 1.5 gram soft dome tweeters that somehow go down to below 40 Hz and are 99 dB efficient with only 1 watt !!!!!!!!! It’s insane right? Turn them on and you have rarely heard speed that is the same throughout the audio band, usually only achievable with electrostatic speakers, which ironically unless the size of a door, need slow 50 gram woofers for bass.
This Omega is just a very unique niche speaker that exploits what the SET amplifier can truly do. I’m almost disturbed that after 20 years even our own speakers have barely grazed this efficiency and certainly not in such a diminutive size. A diminutive size that stands on it’s own without the need or desire for bass augmentation or a subwoofer.
Anyway, that’s my take on the speakers after 30 days of listening.
So from here I will shift to creating a web page for them, a page that will be somewhat challenging to write due to the difficult to believe claims I’m making but I guess that fits in with the Decware Hi-fi underground rather well so once it’s on the web site we’ll notify everyone on our customer appreciation list with an opportunity to pre-order before the web page goes public. Since these speakers are built to order, getting your order in early translates into getting your stuff sooner.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas.
Steve
