HARMAN KARDON OMNI
Curvy in form, clever in nature, Harman Kardon’s Omni family is small, but they proved musical, if sometimes oversimplistic.
We found the Harman Kardon Omni range instantly attractive — the two speaker units here are highly compact and unobtrusive in black, while their modern curves make them quite the objets d’art when presented in white. Omni also has a number of unique features, such as drop-and-drop music selection and a clever way to ‘follow’ you from unit to unit as you move around the house.
The symbol atop each unit — a circle with a kind of screw-slot slash — is used as the emblem of the Omni system; it is the icon for the control app, and this circle blinks and pulses in various ways as a status indicator. It also serves as a ‘Link’ button and activates the ‘follow’ feature, so that if you have music playing in one room and you move elsewhere, just press the circle on another player and it’ll instantly pick up the tunes from the first unit. This works even for auxiliary and Bluetooth connections to the first unit.
Or hold the button for a few seconds and all your Omnis will burst into song, tutti! In these and many other ways this is a wonderfully simple multiroom system to use. In a few ways, however, it’s a little too simple.
The app Harman Kardon has delivered a lovely app which makes good use of album artwork and has a number of unique features, notably the ability to drag and drop tunes from source lists onto a particular player or room — very neat.
The circle motif continues through the app design, with either your devices or your rooms listed on a column to the right — indeed that’s your first choice when you start. You can have each player showing its name (Omni 10, Adapt etc.), or you can set up ‘rooms’ (as shown here). This is not simply a renaming procedure
— you create a room (preset name or custom), and give it an icon (from a choice of 16). You can allocate one player to that space or two units as a stereo pair — the app very correctly insists they must be the same model, so we couldn’t test this, having only one of each, but the procedure was clear and simple.
As you play music the circles for the rooms or units are allocated different colours (see the app screen); it’s extremely attractively presented.
The all-important sources are listed down the left side of the app screen when you tap the icon top left. They appear as ‘Library’, MixRadio, Deezer, Qobuz, Rdio, Tidal, Juke and ‘More’ (‘More’ just produced a “New services coming soon” message).
The services first — MixRadio is a free genre/mood-based streaming service but doesn’t offer access to individual internet radio stations, Deezer and Tidal are paid services (Rdio ceased to exist before our testing so shouldn’t be there), while Qobuz and Juke aren’t available to Australia (through official channels, anyway). So lovely as our CD-quality Tidal subscription sounded, there’s not much on offer here directly through the app, which lacks some basics offered by the majority of competitors such as Pandora, internet radio and podcasts. We used Tidal extensively in our listening; artwork loading and sometimes scrolling were a little on the slow side.
Then there’s the ‘Library’ section, which accesses music on your device. The playback system is good, with proper queueing options, though there’s no alphabetic jumplist when scrolling through long lists of artists or tracks, and the scrolling pauses as it rebuffers the next part of a list. And we were really quite shocked that the app doesn’t offer any path for playing any shared music on your network using DLNA or similar — the HKs are advertised as being high-res compatible to 24-bit/96kHz, but the only way to send such files would be to have them actually on your smart device and sent direct over Wi-Fi, which pretty much limits this ability to Android users who are willing to fill their phone with chunky high-res music files. The lack of network playback is a big hole for those seeking hi-fi playback, as is the lack of a playback scrubber or any other method to move through a track.
So with real limitations on using the app itself, you’ll have to leave the attractive HK app and connect via Bluetooth to use other common streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, and pretty much everything else. This is convenient enough but of course runs at a quality below that possible over a Wi-Fi network, especially as there’s no aptX codec here for Android users whose phones support it. But Bluetooth can not only be beamed to one HK unit, it can be forwarded on to others by setting up groups or party mode.
And that is is a great implementation. If you want all players running the same tune at once, a single press starts ‘Party Mode’. It takes only a few seconds to engage, though annoyingly it stops playback when disengaged and returns your original player to the beginning of the current tune. But its quickness and simplicity is one of the best “all on” implementations we’ve seen.
Linking some but not all players is quick as well. Select your master player, tap the link button, highlight the others you wish to link, and hit the link button again. Unlinking is just as simple, unhighlight the rooms and they’re removed.
The drag and drop of tunes to rooms is a lovely piece of design — it worked smoothly, though the app then froze for a few moments and got glitchy while it carried out our desires. We couldn’t, for example, rapidly drag three different tunes to three different rooms; our venerable iPad 2, at least, needed about 10 seconds between drags to ensure accurate operation.
Something we always check — the hard volume buttons on our iOS devices did control volume while the app was active and even when the device drops to standby.