Excellent review
I've had my Orb Mod 2 7.1 system with the 10-inch subwoofer installed for a couple of weeks now. I'm still tweaking the room acoustics to get the sound perfected, but the bottom line is that these things completely blow away the Bose system that preceded them. A very high-quality and much more expensive bookshelf or floorstanding speaker set might marginally outperform these things, but they wouldn't be as attractive, and they wouldn't make the wife as happy.
My setup is built completely around a home theater PC, BTW. I've got an Intel board that supports high-definition audio output, which means that it has a TOSlink connector that can output either regular old S/PDIF or something called ADAT - Alesis Digital Audio Tape.
ADAT is a format that recording professionals have been using for decades. It's comprised of 8 channels of discrete PCM digital audio at very high bit rates.
Why is that important? Because my PC is doing ALL of the DSP functions that are normally the province of the receiver. All that stuff about delay adjustment, speaker tuning, bass processing? That's all handled by processing on the PC. The only thing between my PC and the speakers is a Simplifi Digital 7075A amplifier. (
www.simplifidigital.com). The amplifier has only two jobs: D/A conversion on those 8 channels, and amplification on the analog result. The sonic result is truly amazing, and the money I'm saving by not having to buy the kind of high-end receiver that can do all of the things my PC can do more than pays for the additional cost of the Orbs.
It's just silly to compare the Orbs to any of the PC-oriented speaker setups out there. There just isn't any similarity. The best comparison, as the reviewer notes, is with Anthony Gallo's vastly higher priced Nucleus speakers, which are only available at audiophile dealers. I've listened to them, and I can't tell any difference between my Orbs and the Gallos.
If you're serious about showing the audio snobs in your neighborhood what an HTPC can do, consider the combination of the Simplifi device and the Orbs.
- Mitch
