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Model: Omega Category: Tone Arms Suggested Retail Price: £1,465.00 Description: 10 Manufacturer URL: Helius Designs Manufacturer URL: Helius Designs
Review by KevinF (A) on October 20, 2006 at 07:13:35
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for the OmegaThe name Helius will be familiar to those readers of a certain vintage as being associated with quality tonearms that pushed design boundaries. Production of the company's flagship arm, the Cyalene, ended after approximately seven years in 1997, yet the Cyalene still has a substantial following among high-end turntablists the world over.Less than 1,000 Cyalenes were made and many of them ended up on Voyd turntables. The Voyd, handiwork of British designer Guy Adams, was another (for its time) radical development. It combined a suspended, very low-mass platter driven via belt by three high-torque DC motors. Voyds and Cyalenes still attract serious interest and bids on auction sites. When Adams' personal Voyd/Cyalene was split up and sold recently, the arm alone reportedly fetched £2000.
Helius arms were not design statements in the aesthetic sense. They were created from the ground up by a physicist and engineering graduate who happened to also have an interest in audio reproduction (he is an oenophile and passionate cook too, but that's another story). Geoffrey Owen, who returned to the UK after completing his education in Australia with a head full of ideas and a prototype turntable in his luggage, wanted to apply all he then knew about the behaviour of vibration in materials, bearings and other components in order to create sonically perfect audio equipment.
Owen was doing something radical for his time: while many others in the field were turning out products based on little more than what looked right, Owen was applying informed scientific rigour. The results were, not surprisingly, sonically outstanding for their day.
The first radical Helius design, the Orion, exploited several key physical principles. The first was to capture the dynamic forces acting on the arm in a new type of bearing still unique to Helius, the second was to achieve dynamic balance and the third to utilise a theoretical point of zero potential and fourthly to damp the arm using differential masses. The fact that the arm also looked handsome did not hurt sales.
But the Orion wasn't perfection. Owen is among his own sternest critics and he felt that good 'though the Orion was, it could have been better. Customers raved about the arm and sales were strong, but Owen the audio buff was disappointed with the strength of the bass and he felt that the treble was overly-accentuated.
The result of his meditations was the Cyalene. Owen employed line-contact bearings instead of the virtual captured unipivot of the Orion, he fixed the primary weight mass to the main body of the arm and used just a small counterweight to adjust tracking force, and he gave first expression to his thinking on the shape and structure of the arm itself. "I had realised that it's a major factor in how an arm performs," he says. "If you increase the surface area as the energy moves down the tube into the bearings, this decreases the amplitude of the wave front making the structure less likely to resonate."
The Cyalene was a major sonic improvement over the Orion. The light bass had been substantially corrected and the higher frequencies were smoother and less overt. The arm deservedly became a high-end reference, teamed with a wide range of moving coil cartridges from Ortofons and Deccas to the Audio Note IO series. The Cyalene may well have still been selling today had it not – along with much of the rest of the analogue audio industry – been swamped by CD.
Owen repositioned Helius to concentrate on laser-based aspheric scanning optics, finally moving into laser telecommunications technology. However, still a passionate audiophile, he like many others realised that analogue was not quite dead. In fact, after a few years and as interest in vinyl soared anew, he found himself under considerable pressure to bring the Cyalene back into production. It would have been the simplest and cheapest route, but one Owen swiftly rejected. There had to be a new Helius arm – and it had to be better still than the Cyalene.
Enter the Omega.
The Omega looks superficially rather like its older sibling the Cyalene, but instead of the blocky, angular bearing housing, the Omega has an organic, clam shell-like structure. The bearing itself is totally different to that used in the Cyalene. A central one-piece unit replaces the inner gimbal, simultaneously integrating both vertical and lateral movements. Says Owen: "A point often overlooked in tonearm design is that as a wave front exits the bearings, it should exit both sides simultaneously, otherwise there will be a time delay, and the one wave front will split in two and appear twice in the next component along the trail. This is the closest we come to a phase error in mechanics, and can result in an echo in the music. The new design places both the vertical and lateral bearings on the same component, ensuring the highest efficiency of mechanical coupling. I think I am the only manufacturer in the world who actually makes bearings specifically for tonearms."
The Cyalene's counterweight approach is developed further in the Omega with the mass now an integral part of the housing, rather than bolted to it. The result is that the arm does not 'see' or feel' a weight being present, says Owen. As before, down force adjustment is achieved by moving a smaller counterweight along a shaft. The Omega returns to the principle of the point of zero potential as first used in the Orion. In essence, this means the combination of arm tube and bearing housing being designed to create a point in space that feels no vibration yet is a mechanical focus that transfers energy efficiently from the arm straight down into the turntable in one controlled direction. Finally, the arm shape is also taken to its logical conclusion. Although the Omega is a 10" arm, the actual tube is parallel walled and only five inches in length – the change in progressive surface areas that Owen identified as being critical to the behaviour of wave fronts takes place as the tube enters the bearing housing.
From a visual standpoint, even the entry-level Helius Omega at £1,465.00 looks impressive. Head shell, arm and bearing housing are all finished in black lacquer, while the main counter-mass is gold-plated. The higher-spec, £2,170.00 Omega Ruby is finished in silver with black weights.
Because of its unique design, the Omega is not fussy about cartridges: in this sense it is a neutral platform that should enable any cartridge of any type to really sing, from featherweight moving magnets such as Grados, for example, to super-heavyweight moving coils like the Audio Note IO series. "A lot of people buying the Omega have come to it via the Cyalene and many of them have IOs," says Owen. "Of course, they want to stay with the Audio Note cartridge – and why not?"
On both models of the Omega, therefore, the sliding weight for down force adjustment is available in two sizes – one suitable for the majority of contemporary cartridges and another for the fatties. The smaller weight is a simple flat shape, but the heavier weight is altogether more complex. Typically, Owen took the time and trouble to do his homework and the weight is rather reminiscent of a swan with its wings half folded, so that it wraps much of its mass around the shaft along which it moves. "The heavier weight is so shaped that the arm can balance 18 gms without any compromise to sonic performance," says Owen.
The Omega has a lift/lower lever that acts on the underside of the bearing housing while bias compensation is achieved through turning a dial which tensions an elastomer thread. Unlike the more conventional weight and line approach used by other arms, this is completely out of sight and, moreover, applies a more linear force.
On the matter of turntables, Helius is agnostic. The Omega is supplied with a template and engineering drawings that enable owners to have arm boards machined up to suit the turntable of their choice. Once fitted to the turntable, VTA is easily adjusted by raising or lowering the arm in its sliding collar, then locking an Allen bolt. Azimuth is non-adjustable. Copper or silver internal wire can be specified, terminating in phono sockets at the end of an approximately 4" shielded and reinforced lead that exits from the base of the arm pillar. Owen's idea is that owners can then use whatever interconnects they like.
I bought an entry-level Omega, but wired with silver, trading up from the Cyalene originally fitted to my Voyd turntable. I attached the same Audio Note IOII cartridge that I had used with the Cyalene. My immediate impression of the Omega was of a still more solid foundation to the bass than I had heard with the Cyalene and the same cartridge/turntable pairing. There was more weight and at the same time more subtle musicality.
The Omega undoubtedly allows the IO to pull more information off of recordings than did the Cyalene – and that's a difficult trick to achieve, particularly in the lower registers. It also allows the music to breathe in a way the Cyalene never did. If the Orion might have suffered from an over-aggressive treble, the Cyalene perhaps went just a little too far the other way, suppressing critical top-end information and tending towards sonic shyness. The Omega, I feel, gets it right, generating a lively and musical noise that is impressively extended at the extreme top-end.
In lengthy listening, the Omega is immensely rewarding and a substantial step up from the Cyalene. Owen has in my judgement achieved what he set out to do – set a new tonearm benchmark worthy of the Helius name.
Product Weakness: None that I can point to so far. Product Strengths: Serious engineering, serious musicality.
Associated Equipment for this Review: Amplifier: Audio Note P4s Preamplifier (or None if Integrated): Audio Note M3 Sources (CDP/Turntable): Voyd Speakers: Audio Note E/SECs Cables/Interconnects: Audio Note Music Used (Genre/Selections): Anything Type of Audition/Review: Product Owner
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Topic - REVIEW: Helius Designs Omega Tone Arms - KevinF 07:13:35 10/20/06 (3)
- Wow you two have enough Audio Note gear to open your own establishment!. - tubesforever 16:11:40 10/20/06 (0)
- Thank You! - Bob Neill 12:53:11 10/20/06 (1)
- Re: Thank You! - KevinF 00:50:27 10/21/06 (0)
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