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Review 2 of 2
Price Paid:
$420.00
from Online from Orb Audi Summary:
I am reviewing only the Orb Mod 2 satellite speakers, wired together two and two as left and right channels. I am not reviewing the subwoofer that Orb also offers. I have matched the Orbs with my favorite Boston Acoustics sub with a 10" diaphram and am driving them with a Harman Kardon AVR55 receiver with a fixed 100Hz crossover. This means that anything below 100Hz gets sent to the sub, and anything above 100Hz gets sent to the Orbs. I believe Orb audio recommends a 120Hz crossover, if your reciever can manage it.
Now let me say a few things to anyone who is considering purchasing these little speakers. First, let them run in for at least 20 hours before you make a judgement about how they sound! Right out of the box mine were harsh little crickets, and I was shocked and disappointed. After 10 minutes, however, I noticed a considerable improvement in the sound, and after 10 hours they sounded like completely different speakers. Now after 20 hours they are bordering on astonishing! There is no more slurring in the high end, and the thin, receded lower midrange has bloomed into ambient proportions that fill my 14'X20' room with a very convincing sonic illusion. If someone were to walk in unsuspecting, they would be hard pressed to figure out where all that glorious music is coming from!
My second piece of advice is to position the Orbs as close to a wall as possible. My first instinct was to spatially isolate them as I would a monitor speaker. This is a mistake. Lacking a midrange driver, these speakers have a sweet spot in the upper midrange, which allows them to produce reasonably well on the high end. However, the rolloff on the low end begins well above 100Hz, so placing them near a wall helps the lower midrange to bloom a little better and aids in the production of ambience.
Had I written this review within the first ten hours of play - in fact, I began to - it would have been quite different. I would have expressed anger over the harshly slurred highs and the thin, labored lower midrange. What stayed my hand was Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue." I had just moved the Orbs to my desk (you can do such things with these tiny speakers) and was looking up synonyms for "disheartened" when I noticed that I could hear the spittle rasping inside Miles Davis's trumpet. I had never in my life heard this level of detail before from this very familiar recording! This level of detail is not uniform across the spectrum for these speakers, but as I said, their strike zone seems to be in the upper midrange - roughly the range of excited human speech - and here the detail is astonishing. I decided to give the speakers another day of running in, and oh what a difference a day makes! Now they sound sweet and transparent. The harshness is gone, and the male voicing has completed puberty. Like Chameleons, they have simply vanished against the wall, and all that is left is the music, rich, sweet, and nearly seamless. (A 120Hz crossover would probably have made a difference.)
As pleasing as these speakers are for music, however, their real glory is in home theater. They reproduce human speech with such astonishing detail that you can hear every whisper and every sigh. I put in "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King," and again I caught details of the soundtrack I had missed before. Even though I was not using a center channel, all speech sounded clear and natural, and the music was deep and ambient.
So do I recommend these speakers? You bet. Don't throw out your audiophile monitors just yet, but give these babies a chance with home theater. You can spend a lot more and get a lot less. Strengths:
Upper midrange detail. Let them run in for a time to clear the initial high end slurring. Weaknesses:
Lower midrange. Try positioning them near a wall for better midrange bloom, and if possible set the crossover in your receiver not much lower than 120Hz so that your subwoofer can rise to the occasion. Similar Products Used:
Harman Kardon AVR55 receiver, Panasonic S25 DVD player, Boston Acoustics CR400 subwoofer.
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