The initial upshot had me slightly shorted on my sound's usual sexiness. That's obviously a weasel word like musicality. It's what reviewers fall back on when we have criticisms that fall outside technical wrongs. Countering us is the measurement-centric opposition with their favourite 'you just can't handle the truth' response. On that score I notice that John Darko no longer has his Kii Three which he acquired past their review. Even a well-seasoned listener and gear junkie can be quite shocked upon first encountering an expertly engineered adaptive DSP streaming active speaker from the uppermost echelon. In just two boxes such an encounter can short-circuit years of costly buy'n'sell gear matching and follow-on adventures in room treatments, physical resonance control, AC purification, cable wrangling and playing footsies with sundry isolators. Depending on how far down that road we have travelled, a Kii Three or D&D 8c can leapfrog ahead to wipe out all that came before and become the final far simpler solution. Or, it could impress for its integration smarts, full-control engineering and related value but still niggle soon or eventually on certain counts which a truly well-curated system has secured after in my case more than 20 years of hobbyist engagement. The easiest self assessment on where we fall on this axis is to answer two simple questions. 1, would we buy the thing under consideration over what we already have? 2, if not outright buy, would we accept it in free trade against what we own? If the answer is no on both counts, all else is just noise. Voting with our wallet is always the final and loudest word. Here for me, 1+2 = no. With that out of the way, let's get to what any hifi review is really supposed to do: describe the sound and its impact on our subjective experience.

The 8c does everything we expect from a premium streaming hifi; and at a very high level. Resolution as down-to-the-bone intelligibility is brilliant. There's no dirt anywhere. Bandwidth is complete so a wakeup call for coffin fanciers and what they presume is required to make it so. Even without DSP tweaks other than bass linearization, tone isn't thin, lean or bright as some still expect from classic studio monitors. With time alignment between tweeter and midrange locked in with DSP, image specificity is of the dual-concentric persuasion so with very delineated depth layering. Focus from absence of fuzz or blur is top notch. Having clarity show up fully doesn't demand high SPL at all. In fact, present the 8c with virtually any trigger prompt from the audiophile vocabulary and it'll return it with a green checkmark. It's all there accounted for. It's once you reach into the grab bag of tube/widebander or open-baffle speakers that the checkmarks return smaller or in red. Completely independent of tonal balance considerations which are easily addressed in their digital EQ, the 8c play it more damped, dry and microdynamically contained.

White power LED lit.

Usually the word 'more' wants to be followed by 'than'. So let's follow on. My classic passive systems do more gush, dynamic exuberance and tonal/textural wetness. With no tubes involved, I don't believe that's down to meaningful THD profiling. To visualize one aspect of difference, imagine a photo of a 100m sprinter captured at full speed in perfect focus. She's frozen in time like a mastodon in Siberian permafrost. It's not how our eyes work. Now look at the same photo taken at slightly lower shutter speed. It gives our runner the equivalent of what in comic strips are subtle speed stripes. That minor edge blur gives our eyes an additional sense of motion over the freeze frame. It's my attempt at describing what I mean by the 8c's textural slightly overdamped dryness. It clips out images like silhouettes in a shadow play for great contrast but at a loss to fluidity. That's back at "just the facts, sir". My criticism of the 8c's otherness relative to my own hardware choices lives there. I find its clipped-out images more isolated than organically embedded in recorded space, its tone textures dry, the small-scale dynamic quivers of melodic lines more rigid than exuberant, the musical motion across time somewhat mechanical.

Relative to bandwidth, attainable loudness, lack of distortion or noise, level of resolution, imaging and all the rest of it, my niggles are very narrow and to the right listener utterly irrelevant. The time and money it takes to assemble a dumb p(ass)ive system to do what the smart active D&D 8c does in just two compact enclosures plus my narrow stuff can get out of all proportions. To my mind that's the key takeaway. It's easy to assemble particularly a budget no-feedback tube system that overdoses on my stuff then completely misses or seriously diminishes many of the boxes the Dutch ticks. It's when like me one has travelled the SET/widebander path then returned to transistors and more conventional speakers intent on cross pollination that the 8c could reach insufficiently deep into the former bag. I can speculate on why but in the end that's immaterial. When it came to whether I wanted to play with my new loaners deep into the night, I noticed very quickly an inner reluctance. For my listening biases, something small yet vital was a bit off. Was I not ready yet—or no longer fit—to embrace a far simpler far more cost-effective premium fully DSP active class D speaker and kiss my complex assemblage of classic separates good-bye?

I frame it as question not certainty. That's because I own a pair of OEM Pascal class D monos. Why those petite amps are on 2½-octave subwoofer not full-range duty is for exactly the same reasons. It's easy to appreciate why I thus suspect the 8c's choice of amplification. Of course stuffing a 250-watt class AB tweeter/mid amp into their enclosure isn't feasible, never mind another 500-watter for the woofers. My Kinki Studio EX-B7 monos make 250 watts. They clearly wouldn't fit. And to be crystal, I'm not dissing class D in general. I loved AGD's Vivace monos. Which leads point blank to another 8c highlight: their fantastic bass. It's not mere reach and power which make it so but lucidity. That depicts not just pitch but fine textural nuance. That nuance routinely devolves as frequencies descend. The 8c keeps those curtains or veils open all the way down. To equal that with most passive speakers is very difficult. It's why both my upstairs and downstairs systems are of the 2.1 persuasion to task quality subwoofers with the job of extending midrange transparency into the low octaves. Here it's perfectly accurate to refer to the 8c's bass array as a sealed onboard active subwoofer. Its only proviso is ultimate loudness and room size. At my dimensions and SPL, simply no apparent limitations factored yet. To wrap this part, what factored most in my overall assessment up to this point was correctness. From concept to execution, the Dutch & Dutch 8c struck me as a premium example of advanced engineering done right.