This is a review and detailed measurements of the Wharfedale Diamond 12.1 bookshelf speaker. It was kindly purchased by a member and drop shipped to me. It costs US $399 for a pair.
The look and feel of the 12.1 is definitely above the budget category:
The back is rather pedestrian but more beefy than other speakers in its class:
Overall a good look for the speaker.
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. Using computational acoustics, far-field response is computed and that is what I present. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of about 1%. Clean high frequency response is responsible for ease of measurement in this regard.
Reference axis is approximately the center of the tweeter. Grill was not used.
Wharfedale Diamond 12.1 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:
The all important on-axis response (black) is almost flat which is great. There is a bit of a valley around 2 to 3 kHz which unfortunately gets deeper off axis making directivity rather poor there. We can see it better in early window reflections:
It takes a rather severe penalty there. Lack of a waveguide causes the woofer beamwidth to be narrower than tweeter's around the crossover frequencies. Fortunately you can use a thick rug to absorb the floor reflections like I have. And high ceilings help too with the ceiling bounce.
Putting the two together we get the expected results which is good:
Near-field measurements show that this is one of the rarer designs that keeps the internal port and cabinet resonances at bay:
We routinely see these resonances being higher in frequency and competing with the tweeter/woofer response. Not here. The port does its thing to extend low frequencies and that is it. As it should be.
Back to directivity, we see its measure better here:
We see the beam width narrowing (woofer) then widening (tweeter). One benefit here though is that beam width is 20 or so degrees wider in each direction than is typical of these speakers. There is on going discussion as to trade off here.
Here is our color 3-D map of the same:
There is that narrowing of the high frequencies (same beaming but now applied to tweeter) and I wonder if this makes the speaker less bright to my ears.
Here is vertical with a bit more allowance for height than normal:
And our 3-D directivity at three frequencies:
Someone talked me into expanding my distortion measurements down to 76 dBSPL which is making the presentation hard but here it is anyway:
During measurements I did not hear much distortion above deep bass which indicates good power handling. Here is the same as a percentage:
Edit: forgot to post the impedance:
Wharfedale 12.1 Listening Tests
I powered the speakers in my usual far field setup and started to listen. One track, then two, then three. I am not hearing much to complain about! Yet we had that directivity error and some lower treble dip. Brought out the EQ to fill those in:
This made the vocals, especially that of females, to stand out more which I liked. And added a bit of resolution to them as is typical of this type of boost. On some tracks I thought there was a bit extra brightness but overall, I liked it better with EQ than without.
Power handling was excellent. Speaker simply doesn't do what it can't do, i.e. deep bass. As a result even with a single speaker, I could fill it with a ton of watts and it kept getting louder until I got scared before it did! There was some amount of tactile bass which was surprising and welcome
At this point I was puzzled that we had some flaws in measurements yet I am not able to put my finger on anything. So I pulled out my Revel M106 speaker and played it. The M106 was definitely a step up with much better resolution when it came to delicate details. It was clearly a better experience. That speaker is four times the price though so I changed it out for Revel M16. The M16 has a boosted upper bass and this was quite audible, creating a warmer, albeit slightly muddy sound without correction for my room mode which it activates. The M16 retails for double the price but you can get it for less discounted. Still, I didn't feel that it provided much of any advantage over Wharfedale 12.1 in this quick comparison.
Conclusions
Technical we have some technical flaws in the midst of good performance otherwise in the 12.1. Objectively this stands out a lot but in listening tests in my room at least with floor absorption and high ceilings, I was not able to identify it. Indeed I was stomped in trying to find much of any fault with the speaker. Directivity errors though mean that speaker sound will more room dependent so your experience may vary somewhat from mine. Still, I think Wharfedale has done a very good job here.
Overall, I am going to recommend the Wharfedale Diamond 12.1. You could almost push me to give it the highest honors had it not been due to directivity errors. It provides a quandary with respect to audibility of such flaws versus some other trade offs.
-----------
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 look and feel of the 12.1 is definitely above the budget category:
The back is rather pedestrian but more beefy than other speakers in its class:
Overall a good look for the speaker.
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. Using computational acoustics, far-field response is computed and that is what I present. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than an anechoic chamber.
I performed over 1000 measurement which resulted in error rate of about 1%. Clean high frequency response is responsible for ease of measurement in this regard.
Reference axis is approximately the center of the tweeter. Grill was not used.
Wharfedale Diamond 12.1 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:
The all important on-axis response (black) is almost flat which is great. There is a bit of a valley around 2 to 3 kHz which unfortunately gets deeper off axis making directivity rather poor there. We can see it better in early window reflections:
It takes a rather severe penalty there. Lack of a waveguide causes the woofer beamwidth to be narrower than tweeter's around the crossover frequencies. Fortunately you can use a thick rug to absorb the floor reflections like I have. And high ceilings help too with the ceiling bounce.
Putting the two together we get the expected results which is good:
Near-field measurements show that this is one of the rarer designs that keeps the internal port and cabinet resonances at bay:
We routinely see these resonances being higher in frequency and competing with the tweeter/woofer response. Not here. The port does its thing to extend low frequencies and that is it. As it should be.
Back to directivity, we see its measure better here:
We see the beam width narrowing (woofer) then widening (tweeter). One benefit here though is that beam width is 20 or so degrees wider in each direction than is typical of these speakers. There is on going discussion as to trade off here.
Here is our color 3-D map of the same:
There is that narrowing of the high frequencies (same beaming but now applied to tweeter) and I wonder if this makes the speaker less bright to my ears.
Here is vertical with a bit more allowance for height than normal:
And our 3-D directivity at three frequencies:
Someone talked me into expanding my distortion measurements down to 76 dBSPL which is making the presentation hard but here it is anyway:
During measurements I did not hear much distortion above deep bass which indicates good power handling. Here is the same as a percentage:
Edit: forgot to post the impedance:
Wharfedale 12.1 Listening Tests
I powered the speakers in my usual far field setup and started to listen. One track, then two, then three. I am not hearing much to complain about! Yet we had that directivity error and some lower treble dip. Brought out the EQ to fill those in:
This made the vocals, especially that of females, to stand out more which I liked. And added a bit of resolution to them as is typical of this type of boost. On some tracks I thought there was a bit extra brightness but overall, I liked it better with EQ than without.
Power handling was excellent. Speaker simply doesn't do what it can't do, i.e. deep bass. As a result even with a single speaker, I could fill it with a ton of watts and it kept getting louder until I got scared before it did! There was some amount of tactile bass which was surprising and welcome
At this point I was puzzled that we had some flaws in measurements yet I am not able to put my finger on anything. So I pulled out my Revel M106 speaker and played it. The M106 was definitely a step up with much better resolution when it came to delicate details. It was clearly a better experience. That speaker is four times the price though so I changed it out for Revel M16. The M16 has a boosted upper bass and this was quite audible, creating a warmer, albeit slightly muddy sound without correction for my room mode which it activates. The M16 retails for double the price but you can get it for less discounted. Still, I didn't feel that it provided much of any advantage over Wharfedale 12.1 in this quick comparison.
Conclusions
Technical we have some technical flaws in the midst of good performance otherwise in the 12.1. Objectively this stands out a lot but in listening tests in my room at least with floor absorption and high ceilings, I was not able to identify it. Indeed I was stomped in trying to find much of any fault with the speaker. Directivity errors though mean that speaker sound will more room dependent so your experience may vary somewhat from mine. Still, I think Wharfedale has done a very good job here.
Overall, I am going to recommend the Wharfedale Diamond 12.1. You could almost push me to give it the highest honors had it not been due to directivity errors. It provides a quandary with respect to audibility of such flaws versus some other trade offs.
-----------
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/
Last edited:
