Just bought a pair today. Set them up pretty casually in the room. W-O-W, can you say soundstage?!?!?!?
They make my Hale Rev 3s sound positively congested in imaging and soundstaging. I noted that in the Soundstage review of the 260s, he compared them to his Hale Transcendence 5s, and came to the same conclusion. To paraphrase his words, it's like looking down from a balcony seat: you can see clearly where each player is sitting. Besides, all this, the stage displays great depth LAYERING, not simply depth (in which respect, as far as I'm concerned, my Hale Rev 3s would only receive a "fair" rating).
I suspect this is due to the Titanium tweeter. I set up an old pair of Mirage M-490s in the San Francisco Bay Area for a friend to whom I had sold them. I had never spent much time arranging them correctly in my room (I had Avalons: The Mirages were a curiosity speaker for me). I had set them up in his room where he wanted them, and they only sounded fair. But this past summer (2003), I was there, he was away, and I spent hours moving them. When I found the sweet spot, I nearly died. They were open, and had depth layering for days. The Omni 60s are to the M-490s, as the Omni 260s are to the Hale speakers. Can we say mouth on floor?!!! And they're tonally good, although I'm not sure mine are broken in. They were on sale here in Connecticut at Tweeters for $290/pair, down from $600. They're do die for in soundstaging, and you can put them reasonably near rear walls. Great for non-audiophiles who could live with an NAD or Creek integrated and say, a JVC XL-Z1010 CD player.
I'm still breaking them in, but, Jesus, that soundstage is literally wall to wall -- and that's with NO real setup at all. Even with the speakers not exactly the same distance from the listener, they create a huge soundstage -- and the imaging specificity is not at all bad (and, again, they're not broken in at all, okay? OKAY??? O-KAY!!!!). Read the review on Soundstage.com
