Omega Mikro
About Us
InSound, along with our partner Mapleshade mapleshaderecords.com develops and manufactures Omega Mikro and Clearview products including audio analog, video and digital interconnects, power cords, speaker cables and jumpers, cable lifts and passive attenuators. inSound also designs and manufactures custom audio amplifiers, phono preamplifiers and passive line stages. We've been in business since 1990.
Throughout our 31-year history we’ve designed our products to bring the listener ever closer to the sound of live acoustic music. Our unique facilities include the use of Pierre Sprey’s Mapleshade Recording Studio and it’s master tapes. Mapleshade uses the purest recording techniques to capture the sound of a live performance in the studio or at a recording site to analog tape with no overdubbing or electronic effects. We attend live concerts and recording sessions – jazz, classical, rock, soul, folk, world and gospel, to maintain current our memory of the live music experience.
We use these live sessions as our reference when we design a product. In carefully controlled and documented experiments, we compare the effects our design variables - e.g., copper thickness, annealing protocol, dielectric configuration - have on the reproduced music. Does the design variation we’re evaluating make the music sound more or less like the live performance? If it sounds more like “live” the design variation stays, if not it goes.
We employ a rigorous listening protocol always using the same one-minute test samples drawn from our favorite recordings. We’re meticulously careful about the quality of AC power during our listening experiments: All appliances like heaters, A/C’s, refrigerators, dimmers and fluorescent lights and computers are turned off to keep RF and other electromagnetic interference (EMI) constant.
We use our hearing instead of test equipment because we’ve found that better sound does not come from better frequency response, intermodulation and harmonic distortion, i.e., the classic benchmarks for judging the quality of audio equipment. Our listening tests suggest our enjoyment of music is critically dependent on time domain fidelity. The leading and trailing edges of music’s macro and micro dynamics and transients are examples of time domain parameters.
Harmonic coherence is another. This term refers to the harmonics lining up in time with each other and the fundamental. Components that do this better make each instrument’s voicing and timbre sound more like live. Components that get this quality wrong change and thereby ruin the timbre and quality of an instrument’s voice.
The latest research on hearing, though still evolving, guides our designs far more than theoretical work or mathematical models e.g., we pay particular attention to accurately reproducing the leading and trailing edges of the music because we believe that that is where the excitement of live music is. Get this right and the music comes alive. Get it wrong and the music loses its impact and emotion.
We’re continually finding new ways to achieve better sound, e.g., by eliminating or minimizing insulation (dielectric material) we find the sound livelier, with more infectious rhythm and exciting pace, less smeared and far less congested. By making our conductors (wires) ever thinner, we find the music has more body, sounds louder, more dynamic and sparkling like a live session.
We also find that protocols for refining, dimensioning and processing copper - more importantly than the purity of the copper - profoundly affect the sound of conductors made from it. Furthermore, one protocol does not work best for all product types; each major product benefits most from its own unique protocol. We’ve therefore developed copper processing protocols that provide the best sound for each of our products.
Combined, less insulation, thinner conductors, optimum physical configuration and copper processing protocols better capture the very delicate leading and trailing edges of music’s constant transients and micro transients. The result? The music sounds more exciting, more like the live experience.
All of our products incorporate a common design philosophy: minimize the use of insulation and use the best sounding dielectrics if we can’t eliminate them (we use air wherever possible); minimize at least one of the conductor’s three dimensions, optimize the remaining conductor’s dimensions, use the best sounding physical configurations and processing protocols. Through more than 15 years of research we’ve developed unique ways of expressing our design philosophy.
Our products look different from others because we follow our design philosophy to the extreme. Invariably, our products trade ruggedness for more lifelike music. Thousands of our customer’s use Omega Mikro for all of their audio system’s interconnects and cables and more than 98% are repeat buyers. All of our standard products (except non-standard lengths, custom orders, attenuators, balanced interconnects and speaker jumper sets) come with a 30-day money back guarantee. We ask only that you give our products an honest and careful evaluation and if you choose to return, assure that the product is in new condition. Our return rate is less than 0.1%.
We are here to serve our customers. Please call us at 202 965 5320 or email us at insound@insoundaudio.com for questions about our products or how to best set up your system. Between us, my former partner Pierre Sprey of Mapleshade and I have over 100 years of audio system design and implementation experience we are happy to share with you.
Ron Bauman
CEO
Insound Audio Inc.
"...nothing gets you closer to the music."