No lightweight…
By Roy Gregory
It’s not often that you find a single company embracing two apparently opposite approaches to product design. Göbel High-End first came to public attention through their innovative, wide-bandwidth, bending-wave driver, an iPad sized flat panel that covers the range from 170Hz to 31kHz, spawning a visually distinctive range of speakers, pairing it with narrow, multi-driver bass enclosures. Slim, silver and almost impossibly waisted, they did little to prepare the audio world for what was to come…
That was the Divin Majestic, a genuine monster of a loudspeaker, each one weighing 530kg, with a massive, angular and heavily tapered cabinet and a pair of 18” bass drivers in a three-way d’Appolito array. Throw in the sumptuous piano black finish and it was hard to believe the product had come from the same designer’s pen. If the Epoque Aeon speakers the company first launched where almost balletically slim and elegant, here was the dark matter iteration of the incredible hulk! But despite appearances, if you looked a little deeper, common themes started to emerge: the symmetrical driver layout; the angled, focussed baffles; the extreme attention to controlling mechanical vibration; an almost obsessive concern with system neutrality. This was the same expertise and similar technology, just applied in a different way. If those original Epoque Aeon loudspeakers approached wide-bandwidth audio reproduction from one direction, the Divin Majestics (and their smaller off-spring) approached the same goal from the opposite direction. If the Epoque Aeons were all about integration and the continuity that comes from what amounts to a single driver design, the Divins offered coherent energy, dynamics and speed – an alternative route to convincing musical reproduction.
The Majestic was followed by the Noblesse, the Marquis and now the Comtesse, each smaller and more compact than the last. But while the Noblesse scaled down the voluptuous, hourglass proportions of the Majestic, the Marquis established a very different aesthetic. Still deep enough to give cause for concern in smaller spaces, it essentially offered a shoe-box cabinet with a heavily facetted and sloped front-panel. Its reduced frontage makes for a visually ‘smaller’ speaker, but at 75cm deep, it’s one that still intrudes substantially into the room, even if you can place its vertical rear panel close to a wall. Everything is, as they say, relative.
Which brings us to the Comptesse, a speaker that in many ways, presents more of a design challenge than any of the others in the Divin series. This is a genuinely compact floorstander. At 100 x 30.5 x 45cm, it has slightly less than half the footprint of the Marquis – and being 18cm (or over 6”) shorter, a significantly lower visual impact and physical presence. Those compact dimensions are reflected in the performance figures. The Marquis claims a bandwidth of 21Hz – 28kHz, ±3dB, with a nominal impedance of 4Ω (3.4Ω minimum) and a sensitivity of 92dB – making it one potent box! Compare that to the Comtesse and you find a bandwidth of 28Hz – 28kHz, and a drop in sensitivity to 89dB! With identical crossover frequencies and a slight (but arguably significant) drop in minimum impedance, to 3.3Ω, you’d be right to conclude that both speakers use the same midrange and tweeter, paired to a substantially re-engineered bottom-end, built around a long-throw 200mm/8” driver, as opposed to the 305mm/12” unit found in the Marquis. Faced with over twice the swept area and a considerably greater internal volume, it’s not exactly surprising that the Comtesse has to sacrifice 3dB in terms of sensitivity to achieve bottom-end extension that extends even as far as 28Hz. That leaves the Comtesse at some considerable disadvantage – at least on paper. Whereas the other Divin speakers can rely on dynamics and sheer bass-weight and scale to carry the day, the Comtesse is going to have to seduce rather than overpower its potential purchaser. Does it have enough of the necessary attributes? Is it dressed to impress?
