Mirage Nanosat speakers: love at first listen
From the Crutchfield Archives
This article is no longer current but is retained for reference purposes only. Information may be outdated and links may be broken.
Sometimes, it’s hard not to fall prey to "gear lust" – wanting the newest, coolest, niftiest version of every product that comes our way. And I have to say, for the most part, I’ve been good. I saved my tax refund, rather than buying that SLR I saw in training. I’ve managed not to upgrade my TV or receiver or Blu-ray player for almost two years.
But I have had some moments of weakness. Such as the first time I heard Mirage speakers.
We started carrying Mirage a few years ago, and I was the writer for home speakers at the time. I was psyched about going to training. Up until that point, these speakers had only been theoretical for me – a list of specs and a couple of pictures from their website.
The big story with Mirage speakers is that they’re "omnipolar" – that is, they disperse sound in a 360-degree circle. The idea is to make a really big, immersive soundstage with a large "sweet spot" that allows everyone to enjoy accurate sonic imaging, rather than just a couple of lucky folks. I wanted to see for myself how well this Omnipolar technology worked.
After an overview of the company and their Omnipolar technology, the Mirage guys started with the demos. They played the scene from "The House of Flying Daggers" where the heroine, blindfolded, has to match the pattern of beans bounced off a wall of drums. That scene is excellent for surround sound demos, because the beans jump from drum to drum, corner to corner. It struck me that, while I could pinpoint the location of the drums in the scene, I could not pinpoint the location of the speakers without looking at them. That’s a sign of great sonic imaging.
Another cool thing about Omnipolar technology is that it allows for very flexible speaker placement. To demonstrate this, the Mirage folks had us close our eyes, and played a music track for about 30 seconds. When we were told to open our eyes, one of the two small satellite speakers they were using had been moved 6 feet off the ground, turned upside down, and was facing away from us. And we couldn’t hear a difference. That’s huge. To me, that says practically fool-proof speaker placement.
The demos continued, and I was more and more impressed with each one. After the training, I walked upstairs to the department where my fiancé works and informed him that we were getting some Mirage speakers.
We’ve had the Mirage Nanosat Prestiges and OMNI S8 subwoofer now for two years, and absolutely love them. They’ve done a great job in two different home theater rooms, with very different acoustical challenges. And because they seem to work in just about any type of room configuration, we’ve recommended Mirage home theater speakers to all our friends and family. I like to think, in this case, what I’m feeling for the Mirage is more gear love than just gear lust.