Darko on active speakers

[ogs]

Darko has a walk-through of active DSP based speakers. https://darko.audio/2018/05/children-of-...nelec-kef/ The Phantom is not even mentioned, just KEF, Genelec and Kii. Darko has tested Phantoms, but in my view he is right in omitting them here as Devialet has not improved sound quality of Phantoms at all since the beginning. Even the little KEF sounds better than Phantoms, with less bass of course. Has Devialet missed the boat here too?

[Rodrat2]

I don’t think so, they are primarily aimed at the B&O and wealthier Bose brigade who won’t give a toss.

[ogs]

I tried a pair of white Phantoms for a weekend a long time ago. I liked them quite much, but I must confess to using room correction. Audiolense 4.something at the time. A weekend turned out to be far too little time to make the most out of it so I did not buy. Very little has happened to sound quality since then although ADH2 and the power upgrade has been added.
Phantoms do have the potential to sound at least as good as the KEF LS50w, maybe even reaching Kii level in some areas. A fine tuned firmware with time correction would be needed for this.
But I agree with you on the B&O and Bose reference so it will probably never happen.

[whatmore]

Not wanting to offend anyone here but in my humble opinion the Kiis are in a completely different league to the Phantoms

[ogs]

You are not offending anyone in my view. Kiis are absolutely in a different league compared to current Phantoms. I suggest that Devialet could improve the sound of Phantoms if they bother. But I suspect they will not do that.

[whatmore]

By the way, the top end B&Os are astoundingly good (and they ought to be at that price)

I would never ever lump Bose and B&O together in terms of sound quality

[ogs]

If you look at Stereophile's measurements of the Beolab 90 and then compare to Kiis you'll see that B&O has ignored time alignment of the speaker! With all that DSP! I would not buy the B&Os even if I could afford them. The Phantoms are not time coincident either despite the design and DSP power.
LS50w and for example the XD series from Dynaudio are also time coincident designs.

[midi]

I´ve compared the KEF´s for a few days one to one with the Gold Phantoms. I saw no reason for the KEF hype.

[Rodrat2]

I was not suggesting that B&O were not good products but their targeted demographic are not usually interested in more than plugging it in and it working, looking good and making a statement to their peers.

[ogs]

The Beolab 90 is a very ambitious design, very expensive and probably sounds very good. It certainly looks spectacular. I have not heard them. But a DSP controlled speaker in this class that does not correct timing between drivers to create a time coincident output is, in my view, flawed. As far as I know the technology has not 'trickled' down to smaller models yet either. Other (older) speaker models from B&O is definitely not in the class of the Beolab 90. @Rodrat2's description of the targeted demographic is spot on.