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 June 15, 2005
It wasn’t too long ago that people weren’t all that concerned with how their speakers looked. For years -- decades, in fact -- sound ruled, and it was a given that good-sounding speakers were expected to be unsightly. That attitude changed, though, when more and more high-tech devices started creeping into our living spaces, and some of these, unlike the speakers that sat near them, looked pretty darn good. The real change happened, though, when TVs got slim and sexy. Having a massive CRT in your room with big, boxy speakers is one thing, but who wants tubby speakers next to a plasma or LCD TV? In the world of acoustics, though, mixing good sound with good looks isn’t always easy. Look on the display shelves at stores and you’ll see lots of great-looking speakers; the problem is, when you listen to many of them their limitations become all too obvious. Most of the stylish speakers being sold today don’t sound nearly as good as they look, and some of them are downright awful, even though some of them cost quite a lot. To design a speaker that looks and sounds good you have to be careful and, more often than not, clever, too. Good looks and good sound don’t come with little effort. Mirage, a company that has often marched to the beat of its own drummer with its rather eccentric speaker designs, seems to have that problem licked with the new line of Omnisat speakers, whose origins can be traced to the original Omnisat satellite speaker debuted in 2002. The top of this new series is the Omnisat v2 FS, a floorstanding loudspeaker that looks like a million bucks placed on either side of my TV, doesn’t cost nearly that much (they’re $1000 USD per pair), and delivers such surprising performance that Mirage may well have set the standard for combining great looks, good sound, and high value in a floorstanding loudspeaker design. Description The Omnisat v2 FS’s slender, rounded extruded-aluminum cabinet stands about 45" high and is available in black or silver finishes. Attached to the bottom is an attractive glass base that can be fitted with rubber feet for use on hard-surface floors such as hardwood or with spikes for carpeted floors. The tall and slim cabinet makes the v2 FS attractive to décor-conscious listeners; however, slim cabinets like these are not necessarily the optimum shape for a speaker design. This is where Mirage’s engineers had to get creative and clever in order to wrest good sound from such a cabinet. One issue they had to tackle is how to get respectable bass performance out of a cabinet that won’t allow for a woofer wider than about 4.5". What they did was take advantage of the cabinet’s height by mounting six 4.5" woofers on the front, two of which are active drivers and four of which are passive radiators. Their combined output generates enough bass to make the v2 FS full-enough-sounding without a sub.
The Omniguide module is comprised of a single woofer and a single tweeter pointed at specific angles toward the listener. Above the woofer and tweeter are "dispersion saucers" (the original term Mirage used for the reflectors) that the output of each driver is reflected off of. The result is 360-degree dispersion of the sound across a fairly wide frequency range from just two drivers. However, because of the specific angle of the drivers and the way the saucers reflect the output, the dispersion is such that more energy is directed forward than rearward, something that Mirage contends makes their speaker sound more natural than other 360-degree radiators that disperse to the front and back equally. The woofer that’s part of the Omniguide is 4.5" across, just like the other six on the front baffle, and the tweeter is the company’s 1" Pure Titanium Deposit Hybrid unit that Mirage has used in numerous other designs. That means there’s a total of eight drivers in each v2 FS. Despite the abundance of drivers, the Omnisat v2 FS is a two-and-a-half-way design. The top woofer and the tweeter are crossed over at 2.5kHz. The top woofer reproduces all frequencies below that. Yes, I said all -- it’s not rolled off low into the bass range as one might expect. Instead, it’s augmented below 900Hz by the six woofers on the front of the cabinet. The one consideration that you need to be aware of with this type of design is the speakers' proximity to walls because, as 360-degree radiators, the speakers rely on those surfaces to generate sound. It’s really no big deal to set the speakers up. I found I needed about one-and-a-half to two feet behind each speaker and a few feet to each side wall to make the speakers sound good in my room. Every room will be a little different. The big deal would be if you actually had no side or rear walls to reflect off of, but few rooms are like that. Functionally and aesthetically, Mirage has nailed everything with the v2 FS’s design. The unobtrusive size is perfect for those concerned with the aesthetics of their rooms and don’t want speakers that are too visually dominating (the primary market, I assume, for a speaker like this one). And if you don’t want to see the Omniguide module or all those woofers on the front baffle, grilles cover them up nicely. My wife absolutely loves the way these speakers look, as does everyone else who sees them in my room. What I also like is that the v2 FS is simple to use. Each speaker comes in its own box, it is packed in one piece (i.e., nothing to assemble), and it weighs about 22 pounds, making it easy for one person to move around (although the weight surprised me -- each speaker is built so solidly that I suspected it would weigh almost twice what it does). I had both speakers set up and wired to my Nakamichi AV-10 receiver inside of five minutes. I used Harman Kardon’s DVD 31 DVD player at the front of the chain. Sound
From first listen the sound the v2 FS produced was easily recognizable as Mirage-ish -- or maybe more accurately Omniguide-ish. There’s a sense of spaciousness that you just can’t mistake. The organizers of Munich’s annual High End show gave me a compilation disc that they put together, Midnight City Serenades: Volume 6 [High Endition HEE CD 006]. This jazz-influenced, easy-going CD is gorgeous sonically and musically. The opening track, "Still I Adore You," is from Dave’s True Story’s Unauthorized [Chesky JD189], and I was absolutely amazed at how spacious it sounded through the Omnisat v2 FSes, creating a "bubble of sound" around and well behind the speaker plane. This immersive quality is more than impressive, particularly given the speakers' small size. It’s one of the reasons to seek out this speaker. Another interesting aspect of v2 FS's performance is the tonal balance, which I consider relatively neutral. It’s an improvement over that of the original Omnisat, which I noted in my review as somewhat subdued, particularly in the mids, making me want to turn up the volume more and more, particularly for movie dialogue. Andrew Welker, Mirage’s lead designer, seems to have that problem licked here. Whether it’s with movies, music, or TV, I didn’t detect the same kind of recession in the midrange with the v2 FS that occurred with the original Omnisat. In fact, the v2 FS sounded well balanced from the bass through the mids to the highs, which made it sound great with all source material. Voices, whether from movies such as Hotel Rwanda (a great movie) or from music CDs with prominent vocals such as Willie Nelson’s Stardust [Columbia 65946], sounded natural and clean, neither forward nor recessed. The midrange and top end are tidy-sounding, but Welker has also done quite an interesting thing with the bass. The v2 FS doesn’t necessarily go all that deep -- it seems to hit about 60Hz in my room and then roll off quite rapidly after that -- but it is exceedingly tight. I like the taut, punchy bass a lot. In fact, for music, I preferred the v2 FS alone, without reinforcement from the S10 subwoofer that Mirage also provided. For movies, though, the v2 FSes running solo lack ultimate low-end punch and blast, not so much for dramas like Hotel Rwanda, which is more about dialogue than car crashes, but more special-effects-laden stuff like Saw (a terrible movie). This is where the S10 was a welcome addition, as it increased low-end energy. Finally, unlike some speakers that only sound right in specific points in the room, the v2 FS’s fine sound holds true anywhere in the room, which is important if you plan to do a lot of music listening outside of the sweet spot, which a lot of people do. In fact, this is rather uncanny and rare -- all the direct-radiating speakers I listen to, even the ones with very even off-axis dispersion, don’t maintain dead-on tonal balance everywhere in the room. This aspect of performance shows up in the v2 FS’s measurements. The on-axis response is very similar to that shown in all of the off-axis curves, even when you look at the response taken from the very back of the cabinet (180-degrees off-axis)! In fact, all of the response curves are similar to the speaker’s "sound power" curve, which is the combined, averaged response of the on-axis measurement and all the off-axis measurements over 360 degrees around the speaker. Sound power helps to explain how the speaker energizes the entire room, which gives the overall response of the speaker in a room. With little difference among the on-axis, off-axis, and sound-power responses, it’s no wonder the speaker sounds similar everywhere in the room. Always near the main-floor system these days is a disc called Flamenco Sur [GCD002] by a group called Gipsy. My wife bought it off the band as they played on a street in our city. This primarily acoustic-guitar-driven CD lets the v2 FSes show off how clean, clear, and detailed they can sound, and the way the guitars are suspended in space show how well the v2 FSes disappear amidst the vast soundfield they create. The v2 FSes aren’t all looks; they deliver sound to match their appearance, which can’t be said about all, or most, high-style loudspeakers. Now there is a downside, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because no speaker is perfect, particularly one that costs $1000 per pair A pair of v2 FSes, while able to play loudly enough for me and even my wife, who generally likes her music much louder than I do, aren’t the kind of speaker with which you "party hard." Although the midrange and top end of the v2 FSes held up respectably well as I cranked up the volume, I did notice that if I threw deep bass at the speakers and deliberately tried to abuse them I could tax their bottom end pretty easily. The Omnisat v2 FS is more about spacious refinement than raucousness. So, if your musical diet consists mostly of a lot of hard rock played at stadium-concert volume levels or dance tunes rendered as through you’re in the club, then the v2 FSes aren't necessarily your best choice.
Then there’s soundstaging and imaging, which, on the one hand, are fantastic, generating a sense of performers in space that few speakers this size can match, but on the other, aren’t as razor-sharp as what can be achieved with a more conventional, forward-firing design. There’s a slight diffuseness to placement of the individual instruments played through the v2 FSes, even if the stage the speakers cast has reference-quality width and depth. This is, frankly, a caveat with any 360-degree radiating speaker, even a forward-biased one like the Mirages. Conclusion Unlike with speakers that are all looks and little sonic substance, it’s obvious to me that the designers at Mirage paid close attention to both areas in the Omnisat v2 FS’s design. As a result, they have created a winner that is a benchmark when it comes to combining style and sound. The Omnisat v2 FS delivers clean, refined, detailed sound that will satisfy a good number of audiophiles. The speakers also provide an uncanny sense of spaciousness that, once you get accustomed to it, is quite hard to do without. It’s this aspect of performance that I really enjoyed because it results in such an involving and enveloping presentation. The v2 FSes aren't very costly given how they perform, how they look, and how well they’re built. While $1000 isn’t money someone just throws away, in the world of audio it’s really not that much to spend, and you can certainly pay more and not buy speakers that sound nearly as good. And in the world of home theater, well, the cost of a pair of v2 FSes is still a fraction of what a really good LCD or plasma TV costs. To me it would be foolish for someone to buy a video monitor that costs so much and cheap out on the speakers that go with it. For those who value a speaker’s looks and sound, Mirage’s Omnisat v2 FS is an outstanding choice. …Doug Schneider Mirage Omnisat v2 FS Loudspeakers Mirage Speakers Website: www.miragespeakers.com
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Another issue they had to
deal with was how to handle the midrange and the highs from this cabinet -- space is
limited with this relatively compact design. This is where Mirage’s innovative
Omniguide technology comes in. 
