Has anybody had experience with the Orions?

Sure. I built a pair over 3 years ago, have had them setup in a pair of rooms, and listened to another pair of Orions elsewhere.

They're as close as you can get to live music with two speakers provided that you can live with the placement constraints (> 4' to the front wall or half the distance to the listener), output limitations through 50Hz (while flat-in room to 30Hz, home theater action movie bass will bottom the woofers if the amps don't clip first. Organ music may also call for sub-woofers (Thor) crossed in at 40-50Hz), and don't have anything too odd going on acoustically with your listening room.

Tim, thanks for the review. I have two questions:

1) Are you able to detect by ear any of the 2 (or 3) crossover regions? How well blended are they?
2) Is the crossover adjustable?

Regards,

Carlos, thank you so much for the offer. I might take it... ;). The Gradients are also very interesting with their bass radiation configurability and their coincident tweeters. And they only require a single amplifier. You must be very happy with them. Is good to know that somebody is having success in attacking a major problem for high-quality playback at home, namely the room acoustics.

Regards,

I have always tought that dipole speakers have an inherent advantage against conventional designs whose main priority is the supression of back radiation and box resonances "ad extreme". Mr. Linkwitz has observed that a good dipole, under the right conditions, is capable of fooling our ear-brain system into creating the illusion of solid objects in front of us. He says that something seems to just "snap in", at least more so than boxed speakers such as the Magicos.

GREGM: The drivers are about 1,5k altogether. The xover is very complex for a lame diyer -- but shouldn't be a problem for you.

Greg, in the past I had fun making mods to several crossovers, including the ADS C2000. That one was crazy. I believe we counted 43 or so modifications! It was fully op-amp based. Nowadays, there are very good sounding op-amp designs, but a discrete design still is a must for the highest quality. This would mean dedicating many hours of design time, which at this moment I can't afford. Another disadvantage the Orions have is their need for 6-8 channels of amplification. The cost of such pile of amps could easily top the speakers' price themselves.

JSADURNI: I lived for a while with Lowthers on open baffle on top of Altec 416, Bazzilla style (bought the plans but strayed from the original design) and realized open baffle is not my cup of tea, at least untill a get a bigger room!

Jorge, I had a similar experience when I heard the big Magnepans (Timpani's) at Heaven Sound. They were very fast and neutral, but seemed to enlarge everything including the human voice. This is no surprise, as big panel speakers produce planar frontwaves, totally different from the way instruments and humans radiate sound. OTOH remember that the Orions have conventional drivers (of the highest quality though), and that might give them advantages over panel type speakers, at least in small spaces.

FISHBOAT: One criticism I've heard is that they (any dipole type) sound "big" all the time...even when the music doesn't call for it.

Fishboat, I don't know about sounding big, but according to Mr. Linkwitz they are capable of conveying the full range of acoustical spaces, from dry to wet. Can anyone confirm this?

Regards,

Jmaldonado,

I don't detect anything out of the ordinary at the crossover points and, no, they are not adjustable.

Tim