Shahinian Speakers.

[_D_S_J_R_]

I speak for ME Doc, nobody else...

Dr Who calls shortly. Can I understand a mumbled Scottish dialect I wonder?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

But it worries me Dave, as I think your idea of what hi-fi type music should do in the home is prevalent, and to me it is ALL wrong.

[_D_S_J_R_]

Doc, I don't regard myself as a 'Hifi Nerd' these days and currently, music listening is casual anyway. Sitting in an equilateral triangle with the speakers angled 'just so' is so low in priority it's largely irrelevant. Omni's in the right situation are great, but to me are too room critical (until I'm proved otherwise of course ).

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

You don't understand them, I will have to show you some time, and anyway we are talking about Shahinian speakers they are not omni, like Cubes they are semi omni and that is a very important difference.

[_D_S_J_R_]

No problems. If wifey has to tolerate loudspeakers in our living room, I suspect cubes against the wall would be least disliked. The BC2's really do look their age sadly now and rarely get used at the moment

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

There are some non omni or non semi omni that pull this trick to a degree and there are some otherwise very good speakers that just fall apart off axis, and there are many speakers that can't disappear. It is a black art as with many things in audio.

My problem is with people who think that a point source presentation that almost clamps you head in position and speaker that are obviously the source of the music creating it like a TV screen of music between them. I hate them it is just not natural music. I loved Quad 57 apart from the point source problem but I modified a pair over 30 years ago to alleviate this and largely managed it. The 63 is impossible to do and I completely reject them as good speakers because of it.

Open baffles pull the trick as with semi omni and in some ways do it better, but open baffles really are not commercial, they are just for geeks. The worst for me is the classic Tannoy dual concentric sound with that beamed horn tweeter, worst of all worlds in my opinion. PA - beamed - coloured - unmusical nonsense.

[_D_S_J_R_]

The one thing the Beeb tried to do with their later speakers at least, as this was important to them, was to make the off-axis response as good as possible and as 'speakers with crossovers' go, the endearing ones are very good and don't 'beam' at all as some speakers still do. I was a 'Brik owner for several years and grew to dislike the amorphous image one got in so many rooms. OK, that's a bit extreme, but that's me I'm afraid

[jandl100]

I don't have a problem with 'beamy' speakers - I'm happy with hotspot listening. As long as it sounds right from my cumfy listening chair then all is right with the world. But no, sounds shouldn't seem to emanate from the speakers themselves.

Mind you, my speakers of choice for the last 4+ years have been semi- or three-quarterly- omnis. I'm not sure what my MBLs count as! Above 600Hz they are full Omni.

Prior to that I had a few pairs of di-pole speakers (that fired out the rear as much as out the front over some or all of the freq spectrum) - Dali Skyline 1000, Infinity RS2.5, Apogee Caliper Sig --- hmm, all ribbon hybrids or quasi-ribbons! I liked them a lot. Also ProAc Future Point 5 - I couldn't get on with them, though, imaging was too vague. They were ribbon hybrids, too.

There's lots of ways of achieving good sound, in my opinion.

As for Shahinians, I've only ever heard a biggish pair (and then briefly) at the Scalford show quite a few years ago. Interesting, but they didn't make it on to my Want List. Very dynamic and bold, but I wasn't convinced on smaller scale music, they didn't seem to scale down in a realistic way. Impressive 'wall of sound' on Big Music, though. I've heard that they need *serious* amplification to get them to strut their stuff as well.

[_D_S_J_R_]

The Obelisk is relatively tiny, but did have a delicacy to it I remember. I've not heard the larger ones though.