[acd483]

Open baffle is such a great sound. After hearing both, I'm very interested in the Linkwitz Orion (or Pluto though I haven't heard it) and the Nomad Ronin (and definitely want to hear the Sentinel). Dipole just makes sense!

How did the Nomads compare to the Orions? 

Let me first say that Orions must be tri-amped or else you need a multichannel amp and the external active crossover is a requirement. This is serious business and the pair I heard was being driven with easily 3-4K watts and had what I call "authority factor" to the max. They're like gentle giants. Very neutral, non-fatiguing. They play with ease, but when the music calls for big bass, they dig a little deeper and produce. To me, they are the Ferrari of speakers. Tons of bass in reserve, scalpel-like control, and deliver the music to the listener without compromise. I threw some not-beautifully recorded music (Bob Dylan, Van Morrison) their way and the Orions extract the best from the recording. I'd never heard Bob Dylan's voice reproduced as it should be. Thank you Linkwitz! In a bad set up, Dylan is harsh and metallic, with the Orions, you heard the rich texture of his voice without the usual harsh leading-edge. Van Morrison's recordings usually sound flat to me. The Orions brought out the proper depth and placed the instruments in space. I was very impressed.

If the Orions are the Ferrari, the Nomad Ronins are the Porsche Cayman. They are graceful, precise, neutral, but lack the bottomless reserve of bass that gives the Orions such authority. As they both use SEAS components, the sound is similar. The Ronins also did a great job with Bob Dylan. They were very easy to listen to. The mark of a good speaker is that I want to listen to all my music to hear for what I've missed in the past. Both of these speakers delivered in that regard.

Now, if I told you for the same money, you could build the Ferrari in your garage or buy the Cayman turn-key, which would you do? Either answer you end up a winner! By the way, Paul mentioned no one had ever asked if they could buy a kit from him. I'm not saying he's offering, but it left me wondering...maybe I should build the Ronins.

The last two choices are even more tantalizing. Linkwitz's Plutos cost only around $900 to make and, by his own admission, sound almost as good the Orions. They're ugly, but so what? It's the music stupid! Nomad's Sentinel, is "85% of the Ronins" according to Paul at half the price. Hmmmm...

[Duke]

I will be debuting a new bipolar speaker at RMAF, October 12-14. 

The format is a controlled-pattern offset bipole, and to the best of my knowledge it's the first commercial speaker that fits that description.  Briefly, I use well-controlled radiation patterns and proper room positioning to give a very clean first-arrival sound followed a great deal of late-arriving (and therefore beneficial) reverberant energy without the penalty of additional early-arriving (detrimental) reverberant energy.

Duke

[JLM]

To me the Deware house sound is thin and very light in bass.  (At the first DecFest that Steve hosted I kept turning his huge subs up and everyone, Steve primarily, kept turning them back down.)

We're mixing dipole, bipole, and omni-directional concepts here.

Bipole and omni-directional are nearly the same thing.  They would seem to work best if the recording was made with two side by side mikes. 

But if the studio uses two forward facing speakers (like I'm sure 99.9% do) then we should use the same to recreate that the engineer was trying to achieve.

[TheChairGuy]

But if the studio uses two forward facing speakers (like I'm sure 99.9% do) then we should use the same to recreate that the engineer was trying to achieve.

That's a remarkably astute point, Jeff    You could apply that statement to electronics used to, but that's quibbling - the basis of your statement (that we should use the same speaker configuration as the recording engineer) is very intriguing to consider 

[Doublej]

Does anyone know the the pricing of Morrison Audio speakers?

[Duke]

JLM makes an interesting point, which illustrates a philosophy different from that embraced by most polydirectional speaker designers.

At the risk of over-generalizing:

One school holds that the goal is to recreate as close as possible an exact acoustic replica of what the studio microphones picked up, or of what the recording engineer heard.  This places an emphasis on linearity in a wide variety of disciplines. 

Another school emphasizes replicating the perception that a listener would have experienced at the original event (or virtual original event, in the case of a processed multi-track recording).  This places the emphasis on psychoacoustics to tell us what permormance parameters matter most.

I fall into the "replicate the perception" school, but in my opinion there are fine loudspeakers from both schools.

Duke

[acd483]

Does anyone know the the pricing of Morrison Audio speakers?

Email him. I think his recommended version is around $2300 and they're built to order.