I’ve never been a fan of large, expensive, multi-driver cone loudspeakers. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last 32 years that a truly large and expensive dynamic speaker system has sounded truly superb and actually made music in a real-life listening space. There are several reasons why large expensive dynamic speakers can end up being a poor investment of money.

One is the hugely frustrating and inescapable fact that living spaces seem to be designed for everything but accommodating large loudspeakers in them. Symmetry, properly staggered and sufficiently long room dimensions, solidity of wall and floor construction and other key elements of room acoustics are so rare a commodity in actual listening spaces that a prime dream for most serious audiophiles is building a dedicated listening room. Simply add $50,000 or so to the price of the loudspeaker.

And you are still not guaranteed truly accurate and neutral sound, not to mention musical coherence and communication. Most multi-driver dynamic speaker designs require a distant listening position to get the drivers to gel. Far too often this places one in the reverberant area of the room where the given room signature, the combination of reflections and the volume of air through which the signal passes all conspire to screw up frequency response, phase coherency and transient response: that is, if the speaker design was capable of doing any of these essential aspects of musical perception correctly in the first place. This is a naive assumption with many multi-driver arrays. Getting 4 or more individual drivers to speak with one coherent voice is a cruelly difficult task.

Large rooms demand large power outputs: double the room size and you’ll need 4 times the power output for the same sound pressure level. Those unfortunate enough to see the parts cost breakdown of a large multi-driver dynamic speaker will be horrified to learn how much of the cost of manufacture goes into the cabinets. There’s something singularly depressing about realizing that one’s $20,000 behemoth has, maybe, $300 worth of speakers and components inside.

If I seem unusually merciless and jaundiced, it’s the result of bitter experience of 25 years in the audio retail trade. Please note, however, that I exempt large full-range electrostatic and other panel single-driver designs for large room playback. Most music lovers are much better served sonically and financially by setting up a hi-fi system in a smaller room, utilizing what are commonly called ‘mini-monitors’ – small, stand-mounted 2-way loudspeakers incorporating woofers of 6-inch diameter or less. The form has become an archetype (it is the dominant format for loudspeakers in the UK) and, while the genre’s nickname is a misnomer (not many of them are actually used as recording monitors,) the small-box loudspeaker has been refined by many European manufacturers to jewel-like precision. The Dynaudio Audience 52SE is one such jewel.

The Dynaudio Audience 52SE is a hot-rod version of Dynaudio’s $800 per pair Audience 52: the SE adds the Esotec tweeter from the more expensive Contour line along with a mineral-doped polymer woofer cone and dedicated, no-compromise crossover parts. In keeping with their Danish tradition, the fit and finish of the cabinets and the wooden veneer is top-notch, though I must admit that cosmetics are the least important criterion for me in judging a product. Loudspeaker cabinets are the last vestiges of the old struggle to disguise hi-fi components as furniture; as long as the visual design doesn’t include fake pink fur and any application of neon, any cosmetics are irrelevant to me. My review samples were maple with black grills; unobtrusive even in the small rooms I used them in.

"The Dynaudio also excelled at the simultaneous reproduction of differing volume levels and at tracking the subtle volume changes as an instrument plays a given line."

As befitting a high-performance Special Edition, the 52SE demands high quality partnering equipment. Like many European loudspeakers, the 52SE presents a 4-ohm load to the amplifier. Its sensitivity is a low-ish 86 dB. Forget about Japanese mass-market receivers and the criminal junk foisted off as Home Theater amplification: their back panel warnings of only using speakers of 8-ohm impedance might as well say “Do not hook up any real loudspeakers as the amplifiers are not designed to play them.” Some amplifiers, generally happy and competent into higher impedances fall apart sonically into low impedance loads, and some, while not changing tonal balance or general response, lose their ability to time and articulate rhythms. The 52SE’s design spec points to a high-quality solid-state amp with unrestrained current drive and speaker control for best results. My antique EICO HF89 tube amp, blessed with enormous output transformers tapped at 4 ohms for the load, worked surprisingly well, but to hear the speed and control of which the 52SE’s are capable (particularly in the bass), a fast and controlled amp is necessary. I ran 6 different amplifiers with the 52SE’s. You don’t necessarily need to use a very expensive amplifier but you do need to use a highly competent and musical one. I used the $600 Rotel RB980 (225 watts into the Dynaudios’ 4 ohm load) for much of my listening.

The mini-monitor form is not without its own set of practical problems. Although compact enough to literally be bookshelf speakers, and equipped with foam bungs to damp the rear-mounted reflex port if the speaker is placed within one inch of a back wall, bookshelf placement of the 52SE will negate one of the compelling reasons to own a mini-monitor in the first place: their ability to present a fully coherent stereo image of almost hallucinatory intensity. Thus, speaker stands are a necessity.

This raises another thorny question of small-box speaker application. Many manufacturers also produce a floor-standing version of their small box speakers, the same drivers mounted in a larger cabinet. The larger cabinet can offer increased bass response and/or efficiency with no need for stands. (Dynaudio, for example, offers the Audience 52 and the Audience 62, but no SE 62). I’m not willing to generalize dogmatically about this, but experience continues to point to the mini-monitor on stands as being superior to a floor-standing version of the same speaker. In part this is due to the smaller cabinet size being easier to design and build for less obtrusive resonances, but also because floor stands have evolved into a “component” on their own, to be chosen on their own musical and sonic merits. To a large extent, the small-box speaker lives or dies based on the quality of its stands.

I tried 4 different speaker stands with the 52SE’s, two wooden ones and two steel pillar types. The $450 Dynaudio Stand 2 worked the best, offering the most transparent results, with greatest neutrality, control and bass articulation. The stands feature a de-coupling rubber sandwich in their top and bottom plates and were night and day better than the other $120/pair sand-filled metal stands I had available. While placing speakers costing $289/pair on the $450 Dynaudio stands might appear ass-backwards, the sonic integrity of my Celestion 3’s when played on them made absolute musical and sonic sense.

The great advantage of small-box speakers is that they use the smaller dimensions of their intended room application to naturally enhance their bass response. They let nature do the work. There is something deeply satisfying about a relatively tiny woofer reproducing clear tight 30 Hz bass in a small room. Small rooms also require less power to achieve a given sound pressure level – you’re unlikely to be further than 8 feet from the speakers - and help by-pass the inherent power-handling limitations of smaller woofers.

A smaller room will also place the listener into the “near-field” of the speaker’s sound, thus allowing a truer perception of its intended frequency response and time-coherence abilities. The resulting stereo illusion can be breathtakingly coherent and accurate, instruments emerging from a believable soundfield totally unrelated to the speakers themselves, which appear as mere roads signs, truncated reminders of the eliminated proscenium arch.

This is particularly true if one listens with the speakers firing across the short dimension of a rectangular room with a greater separation between the speakers than the distance to the listener. (The German loudspeaker company Audio Physic, for example, advocates setting up speakers halfway into the short dimension of the room, and placed on the diagonals of the wider wall. With the listener adjacent to the back wall, one gets both holographic stereo imaging and maximum bass propagation.) One can literally create an intimate acoustic immune to the larger acoustics of the room – a cocoon of coherency that allows unalloyed insight into the acoustics of the recording venue.

The Dynaudio 52SE proved to be chameleon-like in its response to varying electronics, sources, speaker cables, stands, and room placement. While it was possible to change the results from soft and warm to a bit of too clear and bright, it proved impossible to totally screw-up its performance: the speaker’s high resolution simply revealed the changes made. “Uhh, a little less edge in that interconnect there, LeRoy.” The immediate and constant sonic impression of the 52SE’s was that of speed, precision and agility. Transient response across the speaker’s bandwidth was simply superb: signals started and stopped with no slop, blur, or smearing.

Since we use the initial transient of any sound to locate that sound’s position, it’s no surprise that the 52SE’s ability to precisely locate instruments in the stereo field, left-to-right and front-to-back, was first-rate. The speaker’s frequency response seemed all of a piece and unusually clear and precise. Psycho-acoustically, an instrument’s harmonic signature is revealed just immediately after its initial transient, thus identification of instruments was as clear as the precision of their placement in space. Accurate transient response also guarantees that spaces and silences between notes remain clear, leading to coherent re-creation of musical lines, melodies, rhythms, and musical phrasing. The Dynaudio also excelled at the simultaneous reproduction of differing volume levels and at tracking the subtle volume changes as an instrument plays a given line. Its articulation of the relation between lead and accompanying instruments was excellent as was maintaining individual instrumental identity during crescendos and in tutti playing. This ability also results in fine reproduction of percussion instruments, allowing both differentiation between various percussion instruments and also faithfully reproducing their dynamics and rhythms.

The frequency extremes were well depicted. In-room bass response was able to reproduce the 42 Hz lowest note of the acoustic and electronic bass with clarity, precision, and ease. I consider this the absolute minimum for fidelity to music and also the point of diminishing returns in speaker playback. Pursuing accurate reproduction of the bottom octave of music can be both frustrating and expensive, and can all too readily collapse coherence achieved from 40 Hz up. Performance of the organ during the Saint Saen’s Organ Symphony was electrifying, both in its subtle introduction in the first movement and in the thunder of the symphony’s finale. I felt no need for any low bass augmentation. The high frequencies were stratospheric, adding a delicate and refined sense of instrumental overtones and of the ambience of the recording venue. The speaker’s bass response was low enough to suggest the size of the venue without fully delineating it. Fully re-creating that illusion is one of the benefits of ultra low bass response and one of the often-ignored benefits of a high-quality subwoofer. Given the small size of the rooms the 52SE is designed to play in, I never felt the need for a stronger hallucination of the size of the recording’s acoustic space. There is a certain disorienting surrealism in conjuring a cathedral into the confines of a 13’ by 18’ listening room.

The Dynaudio 52SE is capable of very high levels of resolution and fully revealed the differences between CD players and the limited resolution of the CD format itself. Not surprisingly then, the speakers really shone on high quality LP playback, offering not only a vivid sonic perspective and reproduction, but also allowing a deep insight into the process of the music making itself. What the musicians were doing was exceptionally clear. Only a slightly detached presentation – a subtle subjective feeling that the speaker was telling you what was happening musically rather than actually being that musical event keeps these excellent speakers from ultimate greatness. On an arbitrary pole of head and heart, the 52SE’s were just slightly closer to the head, instead of being, in my preference, smack dab in the middle.

Another slight subjective quibble was a less than perfect sense of the meaning of arrivals. It was somewhat akin to watching a river flow: the flow past you was as clear as could be but there was some loss of the perception of where the river was leading. Take for example Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. The album incorporates a variety of exotic time signatures rarely used in music. The Dynaudios were fully capable of completely articulating the rhythmic patterns, along with revealing the interaction of Brubeck’s left and right hands on the piano, and contrasting the ‘dry martini’ sonority of Paul Desmond’s sax. Joe Morello’s drumming was completely clear. The reason, both aesthetic and emotional, for the unusual rhythms was less obvious. Perhaps this result is not fully the fault of the speaker, but perhaps some lack of clarity in the album concept itself, or maybe in my own dimness as a listener.

Like many inefficient, low-impedance, small woofer dynamic speakers, the Dynaudios fell asleep at background Muzak levels. Since I never listen at Muzak intensity, I wasn’t bothered by this at all. At the 78 to 86 dB SPL’s at which I usually listen, there was no problem. Even at 90 dB levels the speaker showed no sign of strain. I never listen louder than 90 dB as I would exceed OSSHA’s noise limitations for the workplace, and would have to turn myself in for punishment. Hint: outside of favorable genetics, reaching the age of 54 and still being able to hear a 16 kHz tone is due largely to avoiding 90 db + volume levels of any sound.

So a very high recommendation indeed for this jewel of a speaker. Taking the effort to drive it with high quality ancillaries and using it in intimate rooms allows one to sidestep the huge cost and frustration of attaining truly high-resolution performance.




Specifications:
Sensitivity (2.83 V/1 m): 86 dB
Recommended Amp. Power:
Small size rooms: >25 watts
Medium size rooms: >65 watts
Frequency Response (+/- 3 dB): 45 Hz - 26 kHz
Resonance Frequency: 47 Hz
IEC Long Term Power Handling: 150 watts
Impedance, Nominal: 4 ohms
Impedance, (20-200 Hz):
3.4 - 19.3 ohms
Impedance, (200-20 kHz):
3.4 - 6.7 ohms
Impedance, Phase Shift (20-200 Hz):
-49° - +45°
Impedance, Phase Shift (200-20 kHz):
-4° - +18°
Internal Cabinet Volume: 10 liters
Weight: 7.2 kg
Dimensions (W x H x L): 204 x 330 x 256 mm
Crossover: 2 way, impedance corrected Woofer 6 dB/oct; Tweeter 6 dB/oct
Crossover Frequencies: 2700 Hz
Tweeter: 28 mm soft dome.
Magnetic fluid.
Woofer: 6-inch with die cast chassis.
One piece molded polypropylene cone.
75 mm pure aluminum wire voice coil
wound on Kapton former. Bass Reflex loading.
Available in Maple and Cherry finishes.
Price: $1400/pair
Stand 2: $450/pair


Address:
U.S. Distributor:
Dynaudio North America
1144 Tower Lane
Bensenville, Il 60106
Telephone: 630 238 4200
Website: http://www.dynaudiousa.com