Found some photos of slightly older stuff I used to have. My equipment is mostly been a mix of Canadian and UK manufacturers (after my early Japanese stuff that is). Audio industry here in Canada was once thriving, and to a degree it still is, but some companies have either folded or been bought up as interest in audio seems to be lacking. When home theatre really started to take off, the pure audio folks seemed to take a back seat, and I think this also contributes to the decline somewhat.
Anyway, here's a previous system...
Components are here:
So Arcam Alpha 9 CD player, Moon i5 integrated amp, Panamax power conditioner, and that old dubbing tape deck at the bottom.
Speakers were Mirage OM5's, and were their flagship speakers at the time. Designed and built in Canada, and the advantage with that was evident the time I spent about an hour speaking to the guy that designed these at a local show, sketching out my room on a napkin and talking about speaker placement...
They are a little different...bi-polar design that Mirage called "Omni-polar" so as these photos I found on the internet show, there were drivers on both front and back of the cabinet:
The two woofers were driven by an integrated 250 watt amp built into each speaker - they weighed 92 pounds each, so not lightweight. The idea was to use direct and reflected sound off the back wall to give a better reproduction of live music. The problem was that to work properly they had to be much further out from the wall than I was able to practically have them, and my wife even hated how far out they are in the photo above.
The amount of bass and the crossover frequency could be tweaked via 2 adjustments at the back of each speaker - you can just see them here:
Interesting designs for their time I think, and as most of my equipment was back then, seemed to punch above it's price point in terms of the performance.
Anyone else had or have anything unusual like this?
Cheers, Al
