I've had Divas. They were great for it's time but it was extremely phasey and metallic sounding. Obviously, I am biased as I own one but the best speaker I've heard is Dynaudio Evidence Temptation. I simply love these speakers. The best speakers I've ever owned and I owned many. Started with Martin Logan CLS, then SoundLab A1, then Apogee Divas, then Duntech Soverign 2001s and more recently MBL111Es. Best move I made was when I traded MBL111E speakers for these. Tmptation speakers are simply amazingly accurate from top to bottom with unbelievable out of the box and immense soundstage, precise imaging, detail, fast transient speed and settle time, completely transparent, and extremely musical and emotionally involving speakers that you can truly immerse yourself into the music.
You need good fundamentals and associated equipment to make these speakers realize its full potential. For instance, I thought I needed a subwoofer with these speakers because my room is huge and was not getting bass below 30 hz. Wrong. I put in 8 dedicated isolated ground 10 AWG MC cryo treated cable 20 amp rated(35 amp capable) lines with hospital isolated ground Hubbel 20amp IG8300 cryo treated outlets. When I did this, my MBL9007 reference 440Watt mono amps suddenly had enough juice to provide the deep bass with weight that I was looking for. The clean AC line also provided vanishingly low noise that removed layers of veil that I didn't know I had and made the music extremely dynamic as in live event.
Now I hear every little change I make to the system. I just can't believe that you can hear so much differences in the quality of power cables, speaker cables, interconnect, and every little tweak such as vibration absorption tweaks on equipment, power amps, etc. I am having to upgrade all my cables as I truly am hearing huge differences depending on what I use and there seems to be synergy inter related with electronics. But one thing I know for sure is that Evidence Temptation is not the one to blame as it is truly faithful to the music. Case in point. I had Cardas Golden Reference speaker cables and power cords that I thought that was excellent when I compared to other designs. However, I was noticing that Maria Callas voice was somewhat splitting in her upper registers and I thought it was the fault of the Esotar tweeters. Not. I replaced Cardas power cables with NBS Statement power cables retails for $3,000 each and Kubala-Sosna Emotion speaker cables retails for $3,900. This combination got rid of this phenomena completely and made music much more coherent and harmonically rich and immensely more enjoyable to listen to.
This weekend I'm going to try the top of the line Tara Labs Omega and next to top 0.8 speaker cables and also have scheduled auditioning of Pranawire. I have previously chosen before AC improvement, Cyberlight P2A interconnects which sounded the best. But I'll have to try Tara Labs Zero again as I might hear the difference this time.
So, it is plainly evident to me that Dynaudio Evidence Temptation keeps on improving as the associated equipment keeps on improving. I can confidently conclude that Evidence Temptation is not the limiting factor to scaling the highs of audio nirvana. The better stuff I throw at it, more amazing the speaker sounds. This phenomena was definitely not the case with previous speakers Ive had. Kudos for Dynaudio to have designed such wonderful speakers.
