This is a review and detailed measurements of the Dali Spektor 1 bookshelf speaker. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $249 from Amazon including Prime shipping.
With the grill, the Spektor 1 looks like a $30 speaker but take it off and it has some style to it:
As soon as I took the grill off, I became concerned about all the "scratches" I thought I was seeing on the woofer. Hoped it was dust so tried to blow them off but they would not come off. Nor did they do so when I gently touched them. Later I read that the material for the cone uses wood fibers and company pictures have the same look. Kind of unsightly and makes the speaker look old so there better be technical benefits to it (core material is paper or wood pulp).
The rear port is "agricultural" as the derogatory British term for some cars go:
The only highlight is the "design and engineered by Dali in Denmark." Speakers weigh next to nothing and are quite small. You can put them under your arm and carry them.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of about 1%.
Reference axis was the tweeter center. Grill was not used.
Dali Spektor 1 Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
And flaws we have. There are chaotic peaks between 1000 and 2000 Hz and too much tweeter energy above 5 kHz. Some of the former is due to resonances in the enclosure/port peaking through at the wrong moment (frequency):
You want enclosure resonances to be at a different frequency than smack middle of the crossover range where woofer energy is reducing. That way it won't significantly impact the frequency response. We don't have this and the peak is quite high. That doesn't seem to be the only problem. If we look at the 3-D radiation pattern around 1200 Hz we see many radiating surfaces:
Enclosure is singing along together with the woofer, tweeter and port.
The off-axis response is more tamed which is good:
As noted, avoid floor bounce by using a thick carpet as I use. It not only helps with the dip around 2000 Hz, but also will reduce the exaggerated treble energy (blue line).
Predicted in-room response is what we already know:
Distortion is very respectable for size at 86 dBSPL but naturally can't do much at 96:
Impedance is 5.1 ohm minimum which is slightly better than many other modern speakers that sink to 4 ohm territory:
Note that you need fair amount of power to drive these speakers as sensitivity is as low as 80 dB. I had to crank up my level from reference by 5 dB to measure these at my target SPL. Small means inefficient in speakers, not the other way around.
Horizontal beamwidth is not very smooth which is a shame as in this configuration with a small woofer, they should be able to do better:
Be sure to not use tall stands as you want to keep the tweet height at your level of your ears or lower:
Otherwise you fall in that blue/green ditch around 2 kHz.
Dali Spektor 1 Listening Tests and Equalization
This is a repeat of other speakers with "showroom sound" of exaggerated highs. First impressions are positive with more detail and airiness of the sound. It is not until you EQ that and listen for a few minutest that you realize there is excess brightness:
First filter is for my room. Usually it is not necessary with bass deficient small speakers but here, there is a boost that was aggravating that some, resulting in both boominess and lack of bass! Just a bit of filtering made the sound lighter on its feet. The main filters are at 1200 Hz to deal with the cabinet resonance and peaking in response. And a quick and dirty shelving filter to taste to bring the highs down. With this in place the sound was good but I just could not get in the groove of it. It is partially the problem with listening to a single speaker in a big room that doesn't have any deep bass.
Good news here was dynamics. I could turn this little speaker up very high with no sign of heavy distortion. Two of them would do wonders to fill even a large space. So maybe there is something to that wood fiber!
Conclusions
The Spektor 1 objective response is not pretty with a broad and messy peak around 1 kHz and exaggerated highs. Subjectively though, I could not dislike it even without EQ. Its limits are farther than what I typically hear in small speakers. With EQ it becomes more pleasant but I personally could not warm up to them. I would save and buy a larger speaker with more bass.
As noted, I am not a big fan of Dali Spektor 1 but you may interpret its performance differently. So while I won't recommend them, I don't have strong reasons to object to someone buying them either.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
With the grill, the Spektor 1 looks like a $30 speaker but take it off and it has some style to it:
As soon as I took the grill off, I became concerned about all the "scratches" I thought I was seeing on the woofer. Hoped it was dust so tried to blow them off but they would not come off. Nor did they do so when I gently touched them. Later I read that the material for the cone uses wood fibers and company pictures have the same look. Kind of unsightly and makes the speaker look old so there better be technical benefits to it (core material is paper or wood pulp).
The rear port is "agricultural" as the derogatory British term for some cars go:
The only highlight is the "design and engineered by Dali in Denmark." Speakers weigh next to nothing and are quite small. You can put them under your arm and carry them.
Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of about 1%.
Reference axis was the tweeter center. Grill was not used.
Dali Spektor 1 Measurements
Acoustic measurements can be grouped in a way that can be perceptually analyzed to determine how good a speaker is and how it can be used in a room. This so called spinorama shows us just about everything we need to know about the speaker with respect to tonality and some flaws:
And flaws we have. There are chaotic peaks between 1000 and 2000 Hz and too much tweeter energy above 5 kHz. Some of the former is due to resonances in the enclosure/port peaking through at the wrong moment (frequency):
You want enclosure resonances to be at a different frequency than smack middle of the crossover range where woofer energy is reducing. That way it won't significantly impact the frequency response. We don't have this and the peak is quite high. That doesn't seem to be the only problem. If we look at the 3-D radiation pattern around 1200 Hz we see many radiating surfaces:
Enclosure is singing along together with the woofer, tweeter and port.
The off-axis response is more tamed which is good:
As noted, avoid floor bounce by using a thick carpet as I use. It not only helps with the dip around 2000 Hz, but also will reduce the exaggerated treble energy (blue line).
Predicted in-room response is what we already know:
Distortion is very respectable for size at 86 dBSPL but naturally can't do much at 96:
Impedance is 5.1 ohm minimum which is slightly better than many other modern speakers that sink to 4 ohm territory:
Note that you need fair amount of power to drive these speakers as sensitivity is as low as 80 dB. I had to crank up my level from reference by 5 dB to measure these at my target SPL. Small means inefficient in speakers, not the other way around.
Horizontal beamwidth is not very smooth which is a shame as in this configuration with a small woofer, they should be able to do better:
Be sure to not use tall stands as you want to keep the tweet height at your level of your ears or lower:
Otherwise you fall in that blue/green ditch around 2 kHz.
Dali Spektor 1 Listening Tests and Equalization
This is a repeat of other speakers with "showroom sound" of exaggerated highs. First impressions are positive with more detail and airiness of the sound. It is not until you EQ that and listen for a few minutest that you realize there is excess brightness:
First filter is for my room. Usually it is not necessary with bass deficient small speakers but here, there is a boost that was aggravating that some, resulting in both boominess and lack of bass! Just a bit of filtering made the sound lighter on its feet. The main filters are at 1200 Hz to deal with the cabinet resonance and peaking in response. And a quick and dirty shelving filter to taste to bring the highs down. With this in place the sound was good but I just could not get in the groove of it. It is partially the problem with listening to a single speaker in a big room that doesn't have any deep bass.
Good news here was dynamics. I could turn this little speaker up very high with no sign of heavy distortion. Two of them would do wonders to fill even a large space. So maybe there is something to that wood fiber!
Conclusions
The Spektor 1 objective response is not pretty with a broad and messy peak around 1 kHz and exaggerated highs. Subjectively though, I could not dislike it even without EQ. Its limits are farther than what I typically hear in small speakers. With EQ it becomes more pleasant but I personally could not warm up to them. I would save and buy a larger speaker with more bass.
As noted, I am not a big fan of Dali Spektor 1 but you may interpret its performance differently. So while I won't recommend them, I don't have strong reasons to object to someone buying them either.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/