This is a review and detailed measurements of the Donner Dyna 4 powered speakers. It was sent to me by the company last year and is now discontinued.
The Dyna 4 is surprisingly good looking for a budget speaker and it even sports a small waveguide around the tweeter! Back side shows even balanced interconnects which makes sense given the fact that Donner is a manufacturer of musical instruments:
I liked that the power cord that came with it was ultra flexible as otherwise the cable can tug on small monitors like these. Overall, fit and finish is impressive.
By the way, I see the speaker on clearance at very low prices. Someone even scooped one for $25 on Amazon before they ran out!
It is past midnight so this review is just measurements. As you will see, it doesn't merit listening anyway.
Speaker at 425 reviews on Amazon averaging 4.5 stars.
Donner Dyna 4 Speaker Measurements
I perform the distortion tests before starting the full 3-D measurement scan. There, I could see highly exaggerated high frequencies so I measured everything with treble control set to -2 dB:
As you see, even with that the response is hugely variable. The small driver plus waveguided tweeter make for very good directivity so equalization should be effective. You can see some of the flaws in near-field response:
I could not detect a cut off for the tweeter low frequency which was strange. Wonder what crossover there is.
Early directivity matches on-axis due to good directivity:
PIR looks poor naturally:
Speaker naturally could not handle 96 dB so I tested it at 80 and 86:
I was seeing so many resonances that I decided to try it with a weight on top of the speaker. It helped a bit:
All the measurements you see were with the weight on top.
Horizontal beamwidth and directivity are good:
Vertically is not half bad either:
But stay at or slightly above tweeter.
Waterfall is not pretty due to all the resonances:
Conclusions
The Dyna 4 monitor gets a lot right as far as features, look and build quality. Shame that a bit more attention was not paid to even response as that could have made it a winner. With good directivity, equalization should be effective within the power envelop.
I can't recommend the Donner Dyna 4 but if you can pick one up cheap and apply EQ, it could do the job for non critical applications.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The Dyna 4 is surprisingly good looking for a budget speaker and it even sports a small waveguide around the tweeter! Back side shows even balanced interconnects which makes sense given the fact that Donner is a manufacturer of musical instruments:
I liked that the power cord that came with it was ultra flexible as otherwise the cable can tug on small monitors like these. Overall, fit and finish is impressive.
By the way, I see the speaker on clearance at very low prices. Someone even scooped one for $25 on Amazon before they ran out!
It is past midnight so this review is just measurements. As you will see, it doesn't merit listening anyway.
Speaker at 425 reviews on Amazon averaging 4.5 stars.
Donner Dyna 4 Speaker Measurements
I perform the distortion tests before starting the full 3-D measurement scan. There, I could see highly exaggerated high frequencies so I measured everything with treble control set to -2 dB:
As you see, even with that the response is hugely variable. The small driver plus waveguided tweeter make for very good directivity so equalization should be effective. You can see some of the flaws in near-field response:
I could not detect a cut off for the tweeter low frequency which was strange. Wonder what crossover there is.
Early directivity matches on-axis due to good directivity:
PIR looks poor naturally:
Speaker naturally could not handle 96 dB so I tested it at 80 and 86:
I was seeing so many resonances that I decided to try it with a weight on top of the speaker. It helped a bit:
All the measurements you see were with the weight on top.
Horizontal beamwidth and directivity are good:
Vertically is not half bad either:
But stay at or slightly above tweeter.
Waterfall is not pretty due to all the resonances:
Conclusions
The Dyna 4 monitor gets a lot right as far as features, look and build quality. Shame that a bit more attention was not paid to even response as that could have made it a winner. With good directivity, equalization should be effective within the power envelop.
I can't recommend the Donner Dyna 4 but if you can pick one up cheap and apply EQ, it could do the job for non critical applications.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
