At first glance, it’s easy to assume that the Marquis is essentially half of a Divin Noblesse. After all, it uses half the number of mid and bass drivers and costs half of the price. But stand the two speakers next to each other and you soon realise there’s rather more to it than that. For a start, the Marquis cabinet is a lot larger than you might think. Despite the straight sides, a dramatic, almost Twiggy-esque contrast to the voluptuous hour-glass figures of the larger models, the Marquis is both taller and a lot deeper than you expect. The Heil tweeter in the Marquis sits with the lower edge of its horn level with the upper edge of the driver horn in the Noblesse. That adds up to an 8”/200mm difference in the height of the driver’s acoustic centre. Likewise, the cabinet on the Marquis may be 4”/100mm shorter in depth than the Noblesse, but it’s back panel runs vertically for the full height of the speaker, where the Noblesse cabinet is savagely tapered and sculpted. The end result is that the Marquis offers a narrower, taller baffle to the listener, but maximises the volume enclosed behind it. On paper that translates to a sensitivity difference of 3dB between the two speakers, but the same low-frequency extension, although in practice, I’m not sure it really works out that way…
What does work is the symmetrical porting that’s been applied to the bottom end of all the Divin designs. Aimed at avoiding asymmetrical loading of the woofer and the distortion that creates, combined with careful cabinet design the result is a clarity, speed and lack of overhang to low-frequencies that is beyond unusual and significantly more natural than the vast majority of speakers. It’s something that the Marquis shares with the Noblesse and the even larger Majestic, a speaker that manages to scale performances almost perfectly, despite its colossal dimensions. That’s something of a Divin theme, and if the Marquis can’t match the chameleon-like acoustic flexibility of the larger models, it still makes each and every recording distinct and individual.
Where does the Marquis get its incredible sense of musical communication? It possesses a musical integrity that allows it to stand shoulder to shoulder, at least on purely musical grounds, alongside its bigger and far more expensive brethren? No, the Marquis isn’t a better speaker than the Noblesse and it certainly can’t even come close to he scale and dimensionality of he Majestic. But it has an uncanny ability to match musical expectations and deliver musical satisfaction. That capability is founded on uncluttered clarity: temporal clarity, dynamic definition, immediacy and the absence of intrusive, distracting and disturbing colouration all add up to a singular clarity of purpose. It’s a combination of virtues that makes for a communicative and expressive musical vocabulary, one that brings performances to life and performers into the listening room. It’s something that has recently been demonstrated even more emphatically by he latest generation AvantGarde Trio, with its active current-drive amplification – at a price. But the Marquis is cut from the same musical cloth, delivers in very much the same manner, also punches well above its weight and does so in much smaller spaces.
Rhythmic gymnastics…
The first thing that strikes you about the musical presentation of the Divin Marquis is its overall coherence – a coherence that extends from the musical to the rhythmic, the spatial to the tonal. The integration between the drivers is exceptional, the linearity and lack of colouration likewise. In many ways that should come as no surprise, those being qualities that are clearly written into the Divin DNA, but here their expression takes on a subtly different form. While the larger Noblesse possesses an uncanny way with acoustic scale and definition, the Marquis leans more to rhythmic agility and articulation. Forget the numbers: numbers that suggest equivalent bandwidth from the two speakers, bought at the expense of sensitivity in the smaller Marquis. When it comes to sheer scale and the ability to recreate the acoustic space within which a recording was captured, the Noblesse trumps the Marquis with an almost dismissive ease. But like all the best designs (irrespective of field or function) the Marquis turns that nominal weakness to its advantage, with a bottom end that shorn of the deepest notes, or at least the weight they carry, isn’t just faster, is incredibly tactile and responsive. That means that it can track the pacing of a piece more easily and fluently, fast or slow, as well as the transitions in between. So, despite the disparity in sensitivity, the Marquis actually sounds quicker, more agile and more immediately impactful than the Noblesse.
