Naim Ovator S-600 Loudspeakers
All prices in US dollars.

Although it might look like a conventional three-driver floorstanding loudspeaker, the technology that lurks within Naim’s new three-way Ovator S-600 is anything but.

The trick part of the Ovator is Naim’s new Balanced Mode Radiator (BMR) driver. This proprietary device reproduces the midrange and high frequencies. As Naim describes it, the BMR’s operating principle is that of "a practical implementation of the theoretically wide bandwidth and linear acoustic output of an unconstrained vibrating diaphragm." Not only is the driver unique, but so is the way it is mounted to the cabinet.

This vibrating diaphragm, essentially the "cone" of the driver, is loaded into an aluminum cylinder that terminates on the rear of the enclosure with a back plate. The entire cylinder is suspended in the tube with leaf springs, just as the driver itself is on the front of the enclosure. Naim says that this system decouples the BMR driver and its enclosure from the rest of the cabinet above 4kHz. The Naim rep pushed on the back plate to show how this sub-enclosure moves freely from the rest of the enclosure.

There's also another leaf-spring decoupling system on the bottom plinth that decouples the main cabinet above 12Hz. There are other features, too many to get into here, but the brochure for the Ovator S-600 does a good job of illustrating everything that goes on with this speaker, both outside and inside.

Naim rates the Ovator's sensitivity at 88dB, impedance as 4 ohms, and in-room frequency response from 28Hz to 35kHz. The innovative Ovator S-600 is priced at $10,450 per pair and certainly deserves further investigation.