Omnidirectional speakers. The future?


I have been interested in hi-fi for about 25 years. I usually get the hankering to buy something if it knocks my socks off. Like most I started with a pair of box speakers. Then I heard a pair of Magnepans and was instantly hooked on planars. The next sock knocker was a pair of Soundlabs. I saved until I could afford a pair of Millenium 2's. Sock knocker number 3 was a pair of Shahinian Diapasons (Omnidirectional radiators utilizing multiple conventional drivers pointed in four directions). These sounded as much like real music as anything I had ever heard.
Duke from Audiokinesis seems to be onto the importance of loudspeaker radiation patterns. I don't see alot of other posts about the subject.
Sock knocker number four was a pair of Quad 988's. But wait, I'm back to planars. Or am I? It seems the Quads emmulate a point source by utilizing time delay in concentric rings in the diaphragms. At low volumes, the Quads might be better than my Shahinians. Unfortunately they lack deep bass and extreme dynamics so the Shahinians are still my # 1 choice. And what about the highly acclaimed (and rightly so) Soundlabs. These planars are actually constructed on a radius.
I agree with Richard Shahinian. Sound waves in nature propagate in a polyradial trajectory from their point of source. So then doesn't it seem logical that a loudspeaker should try to emmulate nature?

holzhauer
Ohm has been a proponet of omnidirectional sound for years...there probably are others as well...as for the future...only the market will tell...
Doesn't Bang & Olufsen have something new in this area? The little buzz I've heard suggests it is legit audiophile stuff, not standard B&O fare.

I would love to hear a pair of Shahinians sometime, but you have to go to Long Island to do so.
The "point source" thing doesn't really make sense if you think about it. Most instruments are pretty big points. Furthermore, even if the instrument were a solo kazoo, its sound would propogate as a spherical wavefront, and after traveling 30 or 40 feet, this wavefront would be nearly flat. A planar speaker can best regenerate this wavefront.