The UNI-Theater system houses three Omnipolar speakers in what is essentially a half section of a 37-inch long aluminum tube. Internally, the tube is divided into three separate enclosures, each of which uses one coaxial Omnipolar driver, along with a pair of passive radiators to extend the bass response. The result is an imposing-looking row of nine drivers, covered by a smart-looking metal mesh grill that rounds out the other half of the tube. The length and style match the sleek modern look of a plasma screen nicely, and a clever wall mounting bracket allows you to keep the drivers facing upward for under screen use, or invert the whole thing so you can hang it over the screen, or even higher up near the ceiling. A glass tabletop stand is the third mounting option. Because of the way it can be mounted flat against the wall, the UNI-Theater’s speaker connections are recessed into the back panel in a way that makes them particularly fiddly to use, and you’re pretty well limited to using neatly trimmed 16 gauge speaker wire if you want to avoid any possible short circuits.

The UNI-Theater combines three separate speakers—left, center, and right—into one single housing. The speakers are similar to Mirage’s Omnisats. The left and right speakers are angled outward slightly to help provide a wider soundstage.

The three active driver assemblies use Mirage’s Omnipolar technique, where the woofer is facing almost straight up, while the tweeter is placed right in front of the woofer, using its rounded back surface to disperse the sound in an even circular pattern. With the UNI-Theater, the angle of each tweeter has been carefully tweaked to send the energy a little more in the desired direction, to give a wider spread of sound between the three speakers.

For the surround channels, I added a pair of Mirage’s Nanosats, the smallest speaker using the Omnipolar technology, and for bass I crossed the sound below 100Hz over to my reference subwoofer. The resulting system could play surprisingly loudly, with plenty of authority and drive. While it can’t quite create the level of soundstage dimensionality and space that you can get with more widely spaced speakers, the Omnipolar drivers do an impressive job of extending the sound out beyond the width of the speaker, and the UNI-Theater does manage to sound like three distinct speakers rather than just a big center channel. Tonally, the speaker is a touch rolled off at the highest frequencies, not necessarily a bad thing for many movie soundtracks, and it seems to compensate for this by having a little excess energy in the upper midrange and lower treble. The overall clarity is impressive, and dialog is always easy to understand without a need to crank up the center channel volume.

I was particularly impressed by the Nanosats surround speakers, which managed to combine many of the better qualities of both the direct radiating and dipole approaches to designing surround speakers.