Phantom Gold: A review

[ogs]

I was probably lucky when I borrowed Phantoms and Dialog from my dealer. The units remembered settings from the shop and worked without any setup. I used optical in on Dialog and noticed the noise. Around every minute... so it was quite annoying. Devialet confirms the error and has promised a fix this month, as you say.

The ESL 63 is indeed a point source design. One of the few time-coherent designs which one can see from the step response: http://cdn.stereophile.com/images/archiv...ADFIG5.jpg . Stereophile even published square wave plots for the speaker! I am all for point source speakers and even more pro time-coherent designs. Unfortunately the Phantom I tried (White) is not a true time-coherent design despite being designed the way it is. Drive units are not corrected in the time domain even if the speaker has lots of DSP power available. Maybe (hopefully) this is one of the improvements of Golds.

EDIT: I guess this thread belongs under 'Phantom'? Rufus? Guillaume?