My DI story from when I received them a couple of weeks ago. I posted this in another forum's thread where there were many non-owner nay-sayers. Which expains some edginess in my revuew. That attitude about the product was, in fact, what inspired me to test this product in person. To the nay-sayers, thank you! I love the product and I'm considering an upgrade to the SE version.
Compared to the signal paths described by others in this threat, I am certainly an equipment hacker. But even with my "junk" holding them back. I really enjoy the DIs.
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Purchased the DIs under duress. My wife has always loved my 804s
B&Ws and her approval was... "if you buy them, save the boxes. They are likely going back." Then
my 28 year old daughter weighed in with,
"You aren't seriously thinking about replacing those speakers are
you?". Sooooo, I ordered them late Monday with the upgrade package. They
arrived late Friday. They were well packed and the are solid (read as
HEAVY). The finish is very good. They fit nicely next to my screen and
in front of the corner bass traps. Basically black on the black traps so
they disappear in the room. All good.
Skipping to the trial by fire. After a couple of hours of break-in my daughter, visiting for mothers day, and my wife appear in the HT door with hate in
their eyes. (this is where the haters are going to state this is not a
scientific test and these people are unqualified to make an assessment.
Please stop reading now. Thank you!) Set up with both speakers
unequalized in any way, I feed some familiar songs from my music server
through my ifi DAC to my Denon 4520. I then switched to my Thorens/AT440
for a bit. At this point my wife hasn't walked out of the room. A good
sign for the DIs. My daughter states to
my surprise and my wife's horror, "Those are the best sounding speakers
I've ever heard. It sounds like the lead is standing right there and I
can pick out things I haven't heard before". My wife just knew she had
her back covered with my daughter and
here she's been hit by friendly fire. I stayed VERY quiet. So the wifer
is now looking for mud to sling, and she actually finds some. The DIs
are not as bright as the well know bright 804s and she interprets that
as a lack of clarity in the upper end sound of the DIs. We did some A-B
stuff between the sets and it was noticeable that the curves/voices were
quite different. Of course we have the room tuned for the 804s
effectively eliminating their bright tendencies, that I feel is their
only character flaw.
So I did some measuring and EQing with the DI's over the last couple of
days and basically matched the DIs with the B&Ws freq curve. Brought
the wife in on a blind AB test and she picked the DIs. There you go. I
REALLY had my doubts going in. My impression is, the high end was where
she wanted it and it was totally clear. The DIs brought out some
midrange tonal deficits I never knew the 804s had. The DIs just sounded
more natural. And it looks like it may be time to re-analyze the room
acoustics. It really is very dead in there. That I knew. I could be
wrong though. It may be we're just use to the brightness. But really
flat frequency curves don't sound good. That's why we add room curves.
Right? But I have some experimenting to do.
Other interesting facts... to equalize the speakers output I had to add
8db to the B&Ws. And I thought the 804s were efficient. Also, the
B&Ws really needed a sub. The DIs absolutely do not. The low in is
all there. Very tight and very defined. The speaker is very natural
sounding. The imaging is better than the 804s which is significant in my
opinion. I would like to hear it with a tube amp and some good vinyl.
You certainly don't need a lot to push it.
But the other end of the spectrum was even more dramatic. We watched a
couple of movies with these. They are very dynamic. In fact I forgot to
re-incorporate the sub in the system so we watched the first movie with
the DIs handling the LFE too. And didn't notice it. I'm sure it was down
some but it wasn't anything dramatic for sure. If you buy these for
nothing else, use them in your HT. But after integrating the Sub at 80hz, the overall dynamics were almost overwhelming.
Bottom line, they aren't going back. They are superior to my much loved
804s. They won over my two most critical, and in this case, most
negative reviewers. They perform from LP playback to LFE chest beating
modes. I don't care if they are made out of old beer cans and bailing
wire crossovers. They work in my system and are a great value with
uncompromising results. And it's the results that count in my book. If
all you have is $3K for speakers, buy these. And if you think there are
some haters on this thread that are hard to convince, you haven't met my
girls!
Bob
