Small speakers for retail store

I would suggest omnidirectional speakers, as what you want is good tonal balance throughout the room with little consideration for imaging. Mirage comes to mind.

The problem with conventional speakers listened to well off-axis or from far away is that the tonal balance sounds wrong. This is because it is impossible to design a conventional small two-way to give good on-axis response and good power response (summed omnidirectional response) at the same time. The farther off-axis you are, or the farther away from the speakers you are, the more the power response dominates the perceived tonal balance. A speaker designed for good omnidirectional response is much more likely to sound good under those conditions.

Duke

Just for the record, I happen to be a Gallo dealer - so I appreciate the thumbs up they're getting here. However, I still think that for this particular application a pair of omni-type speakers makes more sense.

It occurs to me that you might even want to play a mono signal through each speaker rather than stereo, so that a person seated close to one speaker and far from the other isn't hearing only one channel. This is assuming the speakes are widely spaced - if not, then it probably doesn't matter.

Duke

Joncourage,

My apologies in advance for what may look like a thread hijack attempt, but that's not my intention.

I have a stalker who sends me threatening e-mails when he decides that I'm being too commercial. He has e-mailed me three times about my postings in this thread, and he threatened to e-mail others here to try to discredit me. His moniker is Stanhifi, and his e-mail address is stanhifi@cs.com. I apologize if he tries to drag you or anyone else into his dispute with me. And as I've done before, I challenge Stan to make his case against me in public instead of stalking me and others on Audiogon.

You can check the Audiogon posting rules and do a search of my posts and draw your own conclusions about me if you want. And I invite anyone who objects to my posts (including this one) to make it known in public and/or e-mail Audiogon and make your case. I've tried to be helpful more often than purely commercial, but yes I do have a commercial interest in audio.

Unless Audiogon tells me not to, or unless the members here object, I will publicly identify Stanhifi as my stalker in any thread that he sends me threatening e-mails about, as one of his threats is to contact others in the thread. I have repeatedly asked him to stop stalking me and stop e-mailing me.

I do not know if Stanhifi makes good on his threats to e-mail Audiogon members and badmouth me. But if he does I would appreciate people letting me know.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Duke