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The New Yorker on Phantom
#1
David Denby on his recent tour of high-end hifi showrooms...

"In my wanderings, I encountered some products by the French company Devialet, which has caused a mini-sensation recently, with its extraordinarily chic-looking amplifiers—flat, square boxes, no more than an inch high, with a top of gleaming brushed steel. You control the equipment with a square remote that has a large volume knob and four little buttons. I have not heard the amplifiers, but the equipment has been praised by reliable people for the purity of its sound. What I did hear, in a small, glass-enclosed showroom in the middle of the Time-Warner Center, were Devialet’s Gold Phantom powered speakers ($2,990), which look like a futuristic white football helmet extended at the rear. The Phantoms could be called upscale versions of the popular Sonos powered speakers. You plug them in, and run them wirelessly from your cell phone or iPad, drawing on streaming services. Frank Sinatra’s voice in “Come Fly with Me” sounded O.K., but the plucked bass notes in the accompaniment spread all over the room, leading me to believe that the Phantoms could not be a high-end speaker. The Devialet amplifiers are serious, but the Phantoms are a “life style” product, which, in the snobbish lexicon of high end, cannot be construed as a compliment."

New Yorker article
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Technics 1210 (AudioMods arm, AT-150MLX, Mike New bearing + platter, crystal mat, Isonoe feet, external DC PSU) Stockholm, Sweden

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#2
(12-Jan-2018, 22:36)rchinn Wrote: David Denby on his recent tour of high-end hifi showrooms...

"In my wanderings, I encountered some products by the French company Devialet, which has caused a mini-sensation recently, with its extraordinarily chic-looking amplifiers—flat, square boxes, no more than an inch high, with a top of gleaming brushed steel. You control the equipment with a square remote that has a large volume knob and four little buttons. I have not heard the amplifiers, but the equipment has been praised by reliable people for the purity of its sound. What I did hear, in a small, glass-enclosed showroom in the middle of the Time-Warner Center, were Devialet’s Gold Phantom powered speakers ($2,990), which look like a futuristic white football helmet extended at the rear. The Phantoms could be called upscale versions of the popular Sonos powered speakers. You plug them in, and run them wirelessly from your cell phone or iPad, drawing on streaming services. Frank Sinatra’s voice in “Come Fly with Me” sounded O.K., but the plucked bass notes in the accompaniment spread all over the room, leading me to believe that the Phantoms could not be a high-end speaker. The Devialet amplifiers are serious, but the Phantoms are a “life style” product, which, in the snobbish lexicon of high end, cannot be construed as a compliment."

New Yorker article

Tell me which speaker you would declare as high end in a glass box you found the Phantoms demonstrated? Independent of size and look physics needs to be the same for any speakers to reproduce close to ideal. You need a good room to well reproduce. Phantoms are small, but their drivers are about the same size like B&W 802, in fact slightly bigger, have wide excursions, are computationally (in a feedforward way) linearized. The housing and driver configuration is designed to not produce any vibrations or resonances. So, not much difference to hifi speakers, however in much smaller form factor. Sonos is way different, cheap drivers, lots of resonances and distortion, and ported. The difference is like in cars (e.g. Citroen C1 vs. Citroen C6 or Mercedes A class vs. E class). I‘m afraid David Denby didn‘t really get it.
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