This is a review and detailed measurements of the Dynaudio Core 47 professional DSP monitor (powered speaker). It was kindly purchased by a member new and drop shipped to me and costs US $ 2,499.
The Core 47 (4 inch mid-range and 7 inch woofer) comes in a PA style cabinet that is a dens as you could get:
During playback, I could barely detect any vibrations though the cabinet. The back side though -- as I have seen in other amps -- does resonate more:
Despite being DSP based, the controls are all mechanical which I like. Navigating tiny crappy menus on a lot of pro speakers can be a pain. That said, the switches don't have a good feel to them.
There are a set of switches to set the input levels and output gain. With the latter, there is some hiss in all settings and becomes especially loud at the highest setting. It was too much for me in my near-field listening (1 meter/3 to 4 feet).
The woofer and midrange have 500 watts of class D pascal amplification each which is nice. Many pro speakers run out of amplification before they run out of excursion in their drivers.
Even though the back is in vertical configuration, the front is horizontal and that is how I tested it. Acoustic center is stated to be the line between mid-range and tweeter and that is what I used. This forced me to heavily offset the speaker on my measurement stand, necessitating a secondary platform. A bit of diffraction on that side may have been created as a result.
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%.
Dynaudio Core 47 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:
I expected ruler flat response given the DSP and professional market but that is not what we have. Total variation is not high but what is there is spread across a wide range of critical frequencies. There are also directivity errors which I will show better in later graphs. For now, here is the near-field response of the drivers and port:
Front ports always cause more grief than rear ones in speakers and here is no exception. It is transmitting multiple resonances which while controlled, still serve to mess things up (relatively speaker). Strange to see that notch taken out of the mid-range. Wonder if it is to counteract the resonance from the port? If so, they don't quite match in frequency. Anyway, if you examine these measurements, you can see their impact on the spin graph shown first.
Early window response shows a step drop in highs and other irregularities due to less than perfect directivity:
As such, predicted in-room response for far field listening is not nearly as smooth as in well designed professional speakers:
The bad news on directivity starts with very uneven beam width (-6 dB red line):
There seems to be no attempt at getting even off-axis response. There is beaming of the tweeter which we see as its response narrowing. Then there is that big notch between 1 and 1.5 kHz. Response therefore will be very variable based on room, location and listening position.
We see the same in horizontal directivity plot:
Vertical directivity is as bad as 2-way speakers which is strange as well:
Stay at reference axis or a bit above. If you go too far up or down, you fall in those ditches (the "eyes" around 5 kHz), creating a hole in response.
I have a new presentation for you to better visualize the directivity of the speaker:
I am sampling the entire 3-D sound field at three frequencies. An idea speaker would have a single color balloon that would become more oval in shape as frequencies go up (allow for directivity decrease). That is hard to do for any practical speaker. Here we see better approximation of that at 1000 Hz. As we climb up, response gets more complex and variable. Will be interesting to see how we do with other speakers moving forward as I plot this. Let me know what you think of this.
Our waterfall measurement shows ample resonances which are more internal ones than cabinet:
Extra amplification power is really helping at lower playback levels:
The midrange though seems unhappy and starts to complain at 96 dBSPL.
Dynaudio Core 47 Listening Tests and Equalization
With most powered professional monitors, I only have to play a few seconds to know the sound is "right." That did not happen here. No matter what I played, I could not get enjoyable sound out of the Core 47. The frequency response variations are not high enough to explain this so it may be me. I did attempt to improve things using a bit of EQ:
Subjectively, this made things a bit better sometimes, but not other times. So more care needs to go into creating such precise filters. When it did work, it definitely brought out what I though was missing in the sound.
On good news front, playback limit does not exist. I could crank up the Core 47 as much as I could tolerate (in near-field listening) and it kept getting louder and louder. I was however disappointed that it simply filtered out sub-bass so you need a sub to go with it.
Conclusions
At $2,500 I expect perfection in a professional powered monitor with DSP. I did not get that, objectively or subjectively. It is very strange but it seems that Dynaudio just doesn't believe in directivity control. Have they gone to a different school of speaker design that says off-axis response doesn't need to be similar in tonality to on-axis? How about lack of flatness of the frequency response despite having DSP for at least some correction?
Really, this thing feels like someone took a high powered engine and stuck it in a poor handling car. It has the dynamics but none of the perfect tonality you want out of a powered speaker.
Maybe I am wrong in which case I let you judge the measurements.
I can't recommend the Dynaudio Core 47. There are plenty of better sounding powered monitors which almost deliver perfection. Yes, they don't get as loud so you get to decide which is important to you.
------------
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/
The Core 47 (4 inch mid-range and 7 inch woofer) comes in a PA style cabinet that is a dens as you could get:
During playback, I could barely detect any vibrations though the cabinet. The back side though -- as I have seen in other amps -- does resonate more:
Despite being DSP based, the controls are all mechanical which I like. Navigating tiny crappy menus on a lot of pro speakers can be a pain. That said, the switches don't have a good feel to them.
There are a set of switches to set the input levels and output gain. With the latter, there is some hiss in all settings and becomes especially loud at the highest setting. It was too much for me in my near-field listening (1 meter/3 to 4 feet).
The woofer and midrange have 500 watts of class D pascal amplification each which is nice. Many pro speakers run out of amplification before they run out of excursion in their drivers.
Even though the back is in vertical configuration, the front is horizontal and that is how I tested it. Acoustic center is stated to be the line between mid-range and tweeter and that is what I used. This forced me to heavily offset the speaker on my measurement stand, necessitating a secondary platform. A bit of diffraction on that side may have been created as a result.
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%.
Dynaudio Core 47 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:
I expected ruler flat response given the DSP and professional market but that is not what we have. Total variation is not high but what is there is spread across a wide range of critical frequencies. There are also directivity errors which I will show better in later graphs. For now, here is the near-field response of the drivers and port:
Front ports always cause more grief than rear ones in speakers and here is no exception. It is transmitting multiple resonances which while controlled, still serve to mess things up (relatively speaker). Strange to see that notch taken out of the mid-range. Wonder if it is to counteract the resonance from the port? If so, they don't quite match in frequency. Anyway, if you examine these measurements, you can see their impact on the spin graph shown first.
Early window response shows a step drop in highs and other irregularities due to less than perfect directivity:
As such, predicted in-room response for far field listening is not nearly as smooth as in well designed professional speakers:
The bad news on directivity starts with very uneven beam width (-6 dB red line):
There seems to be no attempt at getting even off-axis response. There is beaming of the tweeter which we see as its response narrowing. Then there is that big notch between 1 and 1.5 kHz. Response therefore will be very variable based on room, location and listening position.
We see the same in horizontal directivity plot:
Vertical directivity is as bad as 2-way speakers which is strange as well:
Stay at reference axis or a bit above. If you go too far up or down, you fall in those ditches (the "eyes" around 5 kHz), creating a hole in response.
I have a new presentation for you to better visualize the directivity of the speaker:
I am sampling the entire 3-D sound field at three frequencies. An idea speaker would have a single color balloon that would become more oval in shape as frequencies go up (allow for directivity decrease). That is hard to do for any practical speaker. Here we see better approximation of that at 1000 Hz. As we climb up, response gets more complex and variable. Will be interesting to see how we do with other speakers moving forward as I plot this. Let me know what you think of this.
Our waterfall measurement shows ample resonances which are more internal ones than cabinet:
Extra amplification power is really helping at lower playback levels:
The midrange though seems unhappy and starts to complain at 96 dBSPL.
Dynaudio Core 47 Listening Tests and Equalization
With most powered professional monitors, I only have to play a few seconds to know the sound is "right." That did not happen here. No matter what I played, I could not get enjoyable sound out of the Core 47. The frequency response variations are not high enough to explain this so it may be me. I did attempt to improve things using a bit of EQ:
Subjectively, this made things a bit better sometimes, but not other times. So more care needs to go into creating such precise filters. When it did work, it definitely brought out what I though was missing in the sound.
On good news front, playback limit does not exist. I could crank up the Core 47 as much as I could tolerate (in near-field listening) and it kept getting louder and louder. I was however disappointed that it simply filtered out sub-bass so you need a sub to go with it.
Conclusions
At $2,500 I expect perfection in a professional powered monitor with DSP. I did not get that, objectively or subjectively. It is very strange but it seems that Dynaudio just doesn't believe in directivity control. Have they gone to a different school of speaker design that says off-axis response doesn't need to be similar in tonality to on-axis? How about lack of flatness of the frequency response despite having DSP for at least some correction?
Really, this thing feels like someone took a high powered engine and stuck it in a poor handling car. It has the dynamics but none of the perfect tonality you want out of a powered speaker.
Maybe I am wrong in which case I let you judge the measurements.
I can't recommend the Dynaudio Core 47. There are plenty of better sounding powered monitors which almost deliver perfection. Yes, they don't get as loud so you get to decide which is important to you.
------------
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/