Mirage Nanosat 5.1-Channel Speaker System

Small Speakers; Gigantic Soundstage

On multichannel records that capture plenty of hall ambience, such as "Not While I'm Around," from Christy Baron's Retrospectives [Chesky SACD], which Baron and her small jazz ensemble recorded in the interior of a church, the Nanosats do a great job of transforming the acoustics of your listening room into those of the recording space. Compared to direct radiator-based surround systems in this price range, I found the Nanosats generally more captivating and musically believable—largely because they raise the bar for imaging smoothness and continuity several notches higher than you normally expect from an $800 system. Their spatial characteristics also served orchestral music well, doing a good job of showing sections of the orchestra broadly arrayed across a stage in front of the listener (with sounds of hall ambience wrapping around to the sides). The only place where the Nanosats occasionally disappoint is on music that is appropriately close miked, such as "Gaia" from James Taylor's Hourglass [Sony SACD], where the Nanosats lose some of Taylor's vocal intensity, ever so subtly smoothing over inflections and textures you would hear more clearly through a good set of direct radiators. Nevertheless, this seems to me an acceptable tradeoff, given the smooth spaciousness the Nanosats otherwise bring to music.

The Nanosat system, like any small system, has dynamic limitations you must observe, but as long as you play within the system's capabilities, it will reward you with sound that is at once enveloping and exciting, yet also relaxing—a very tough combination to pull off.

On the basis of this review experience, the Nanosat system has become one of my favorites in this price range (I found it even more engaging than the very good and identically priced Energy act6 surround system I reviewed a few months back). Compared to most systems at this price, the Nanosat offers superior imaging smoothness and three-dimensionality, greater freedom from edginess, better subwoofer integration, and reasonably neutral tonal balance that equals the best I've heard in this class. If you respond as favorably as I do to the things that omni-directional speakers do well, then I think Mirage's Nanosat system stands a good chance of becoming one of your favorites, as well.