Proof that the Danes are serious about their unusual mix of quasi PA headroom and 'established' hifi virtues showed with an undistorted neutral midrange which rendered vocals without excess silk or add-on seductive warmth. Hozier's "In the woods somewhere" with its gloomy beauty rose with grip, presence and sharply outlined against the deliberately odd instrumentation. The Irish singer has marked yet not unusually potent pipes which the Dansk power box didn't attempt to change. Likewise for the acoustic guitars and piano on Jupiter Jones' "Atmen", a brilliant live version of the songwriter tellie show TV Noir. Those the V12c rendered equally unembellished, natural and most clear. For a female Blues crosscheck I reached for Irish compatriot Grainne Duffy and her "Meant to break" from Out of the Dark. This feels believable only when her song has both clarity and body but under no conditions any softening agent. Some voices carry a certain coolness which must come across. Here the Vestlyd betrayed no discernible weaknesses. Its midband kept pace with costlier fare like the aforementioned much-praised Heco Direkt.

Let's cover 'declawed'. In our sector that's a double-edged sword. If we read that speaker XYZ is forgiving, there are immediate complaints of "crap, no resolution, no detail". From the other side of the aisle we hear "I'd never buy a speaker that isn't fun with all music to include non-audiophile productions". Key to which way things go is routinely how the designer has voiced his treble. With Vestlyd we deal with a compression driver that's unapologetically groomed for high SPL. That could badly misfire but doesn't. Our Danish team really did manage to tame their titanium tweeter such that even brisk fare doesn't bite or turn toxic yet neither falls prey to withholding relevant HF data.

This recalled our fairaudio 'Favourite Award' winner, Canton's C309 monitor which offered a similarly destressed top without obscuring facts by slightly rolling off the last octave. With the Vestlyd that type tuning entails a small loss of airiness where the Hessian retains a tad more resolution and openness. This I laid at the feet of the Danish compression tweeter whose type often won't sound quite as feathery light. Just so I encountered no objectionable hardness. Resolution and Occam's razor? The latter calls for the simplest explanation usually being correct. Cut off all fluff and magical thinking and what remains is the truth. Applied to the V12c's resolution, it explains how Vestlyd haven't really gone after an acoustic electron microscope.

A personal testbed for that is always Tool's masterwork Fear Inoculum with its structurally dense “Descending” where individual melodic elements zigzag in parallel to dovetail into a grand melt. That big picture clearly was far more relevant to our power boxes than unfurling isolated sonic tendrils. There was enough illumination on the full facts but gratefully not so close and personal as to get academic. I had a good view on the musical surface where the V12c snorkelled along rather than wearing the full wet suit with oxygen tank required for deeper dives. According to Vestlyd's marketing, one of the design goals for their new speaker range was the concert atmosphere's live feel transported to the living room. Dynamically speaking I'll happily sign on that dotted line. How about the virtual stage perspective? That I found nicely realistic, never exaggerated or too crowded though for my tastes lateral expanse could have been a tad more generous. But I saw no reason to fault it for not following the recently tested C309 whose soundstage depth and width exceeded pure textbook. Spot on I found the relative spacing of performer images and their location sharpness. Part of the turn-on factor here is a slightly forward projection of the musical action without causing any unsolicited lap-dance embarrassment.