Phantom Gold: A review

[srima]

Wow, this is high praise! I am sure Golds are very good indeed. I wonder how Silvers would stand if compared to Golds in this setting?

I haven't heard the Silver's, but the rumor mill is that they are not as refined sounding. The tweeter design is different between the two. 

I should balance my review by saying  a couple more things. There are unresolved bugs with the Phantom you should be aware of. First, if you plug in an optical cable in the Dialog (the Devialet router that talks to the Phantoms), it can generate occasional noise. I heard a little buzz that lasted half a second or thereabouts once or twice in several hours of listening. Some people seem to have a worse problem. Devialet has been dragging its feet on fixing this bug, but have acknowledged it's there, and claim to have an update later this month that fixes it. 

Second, I wanted to try the direct ethernet input and had to recable one of the Phantom's. I have the Devialet Branch, a nice stand for the Phantom's. It took me forever to get it off this stand, rewire, and plug it back. (I learned a few things that will make it faster next time around). Restarting the setup took much more time because it had trouble finding both Phantom's. 

Finally, I must emphasize again that the sound of the Phantom's entirely depends on whether you like the sound of point source loudspeakers. I have my Quad 57s in an adjacent family room with the D400s, and they sound entirely different from the Phantom's. The Quad's radiating surface is about 20x larger than the Phantom's. So, they produce a kind of enveloping sound that makes you feel you are sitting in the first few rows close to the orchestra or the musicians. This can feel nice, but it's kind of a coloration that shouldn't be there. Quad designer Peter Walker realized this, and for the ESL 63, he artificially made it resemble a point source by using delay lines to taper the signal so it resembled a ripple when a stone falls into a lake. The center of the speaker is energized before the surrounding areas. Harbeth's Alan Shaw also believe strongly in point source sound. The Harbeth Monitor 40 is a huge speaker (Stand mounted) with a large baffle. But it sounds kind of funny because it is mimicking a point source. The sound is not in your face, but somewhat distant, and this can be disconcerting with a large speaker. 

So, if you like the sound of a large planar, like the Magneplanar 3.6 or 20.1, or the large moving coil loudspeakers (like line array sources), you will not be happy with the Phantom. But, point source speakers have a kind of accuracy that can be very appealing as long as you realize that not all your music will sound pleasant. If a recording is mastered poorly with mikes placed inside an instrument, it's going to sound pretty bad through the Phantom. But well recorded material sounds magnificent indeed. 

My overall feeling is that the Phantom needs a lot more work to be a durable workhorse for the everyday music lover. The setup procedure is needlessly complicated, and the interfaces are confusing. It's not surprising that Devialet provides free set up for anyone purchasing the Phantom. This is a system that can befuddle even knowledgable tech users.