Now, please note: I didn’t say it needs a good sub. The bottom-end goes deep enough and is certainly informative enough to satisfy on a musical level. What it isn’t, is visceral. Göbel offer bigger speakers to tick that box, as well as their own sub-woofers. But the Comtesse offers a fascinating and unusual combination of physical and musical virtues that make it peculiarly suited to pairing with a set of serious subs.
The first and most obvious of these characteristics is size. The Comtesse is an extremely compact speaker whose beautifully balanced bottom-end means that it will work in smaller spaces.
The second is its sheer quality. The Comtesse shares its construction and the drivers that generate the vast majority of the musical range with the other Divin speakers – essentially the same high and mid-frequency drivers as the massive Majestic and slightly less massive Noblesse. Göbel has leant more than a little about working with those drivers and mating them – and it shows.
Thirdly – and perhaps most importantly of all – is the speakers’ low-frequency linearity. As I’ve already suggested many speakers, especially smaller speakers (of which this is one) tailor their bottom-end output to augment the sense of musical foundation, scale and weight. That makes mating them to a sub-woofer a far more challenging proposition, especially if you want to run the main speakers full-range, in order to avoid an additional high-pass filter in line with the mid-band (and the rest of the range).
By avoiding the temptation to juice the bottom-end of the Comtesse, Göbel has created one of the most directly insightful loudspeakers I’ve lived with. At the same time it has also, by default, made a speaker that works wonderfully well with high-quality sub-woofers. It’s no coincidence that when the company first launched the speakers in Munich last year, they did so in a system that also employed a pair of Sovereign sub-woofers. With the Comtesse installed in the main Music Room, the temptation to run them with the PureLow GR subs was just too great to resist – as were the results. Detailed discussion of that set-up is outside the scope of this review and will wait for the arrival of the Sovereign subs from Göbel, which is already planned. But it is certainly worth noting that this is a trick the Comtesse can turn. An impressive performer as a standalone speaker, it’s also a perfect partner in a four-box set-up if you need to generate scale and full-range reproduction in a smaller space, or one that demands a more discrete solution.
The Divin Comtesse is as fascinating, different and distinctive as it is immune to the clichéd tropes of audio reviewing. It doesn’t tread the familiar path of trying to sound bigger than it is. It doesn’t sweeten the musical message with the rounding, smudging effects of intermodulation distortion and stored energy. It doesn’t rely on some, single, stand-out feature or attribute to gain short term attention (at the cost of long-term frustration). Instead, it depends on being correct: correct in the sense of manners and behaviour, as well as in terms of presentational or spectral liberties. The phrase, “A place for everything and everything in its place” might have been coined to describe the Comtesse. It reflects the speakers’ inherent sense of musical balance, perspective and temporal accuracy. But it doesn’t reflect just how deep a musical insight they can provide.
