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Some images on making a Diapason enclosure:
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Sonics: Diapason’s Adamante is a real jewel in three different ways – being small, costly and sonically sparkling. To have this bill add up relies on a few conditions. The room to be energized shouldn’t exceed 25m²; parties must run a back-up speaker; and kettle drums and giant organ pipes aren't expected since true low bass will be MIA. That’s true of course for all same-sized monitors and no surprise. Equally true is that for the same coin there are floorstanders and bigger monitors like Harbeth’s Super HL5 which are superior in bass reach and SPL stability. But that’s a given to those into compact high-end monitor speakers. They value other aspects. And there today’s babe is quite stacked.
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First, praise must be heaped on how exceptionally free the music decouples from the boxes. The usual disappearance act really fits. A good yard stick for that is the precision of the left/right progression. A dead center recorded voice or instrument is localized properly by most any speaker. Ditto for events that occur ca. 25% off-center to either the left or right. Most boxes still position such sounds accurately. In my opinion the trouble usually starts in the outer fringes. It’s as though such sounds then were magnetized to be magically captured by the speakers. The closer such sounds are to the outsides, the higher the likelihood that they seem to emerge from the boxes. The Adamante ‘demagnetizes’ such effects. She organizes the lateral spread very cleanly all the way to the edges and nothing ever sticks to the speakers.
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The same liberation of unambiguous staging and localization precision holds true also for front-to-back layering. Recording permitting, the Diapason knows how to illuminate truly cavernous acoustics well beyond average – including at the edges and far corners where most speakers run into issues. Forget sounds which are somewhat quieter to suggest farther back but really stuck to the driver. The Adamante simply disappears from the equation. To the extent she does is truly beyond most loudspeakers. On soundstaging, this Diapason explores new vistas. Yet despite the ultra-transparent PanaVision spread, voices and instruments retain their natural body and don't default into angular etched outlines. Just how spectacular this virtue had been implemented was brought home vis-à-vis my Thiel SCS4. At €2.200/pr, it is quite a benchmark in this regard. Sure, you expect more from a twice-priced speaker but the question remains, where and how? That the Thiel’s acknowledged staging acumen would find itself relegated to second place with this much room to spare was, I must confess, very confounding.
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