Loudspeakers

DALI is justifiably proud of the extent of 'home grown' engineering inside its flagship loudspeaker. 'Every driver is designed and built in house,' says CEO Lars Worre. 'We even assemble the custom magnet systems and wind the coils, and although the mylar/etched film used in our planar tweeter is sourced from China, this speaker is still as Danish as it gets!'

The wood fibres in its bass and mid units are a DALI staple, its engineers having worked with this cone material for many years. 'These wood pulp cones do not have the damping of polypropylene, for example', says Lars, 'so it's like a wild horse that we have to tame! We work with the geometry and surround, adapting the shape, the amount and type of doping, the glue, etc, not to kill this liveliness with excess damping but to use its properties constructively, optimising the driver(s) for off axis listening'.

With the development of the KORE informed as much by extensive listening sessions as time spent in the lab, DALI was keen to ensure this huge speaker could sound 'small' and delicate when required. 'There's as much art as science in achieving a seamless sound with big multiway speakers', says Lars, 'so we don't subscribe to any one particular filter design – we are not idealists, we take the most practical route to deliver a better correlation between the direct and reverberant soundfield'.

And trickledown from all that's been learnt so far? The reduction in eddy current distortion from its 'double gap' drivers is already benefitting DALI's new series of in-wall/in-ceiling loudspeakers. PM