As any cyclist will tell you, there’s a world of difference between riding into a head-wind and having a following breeze. Being the sole voice in a wilderness of box-speakers was always going to be a challenging scenario, but Diptyque have been fortunate in that their products have reached the market alongside panel speakers from Alsyvox and Clarisys, while of the three, their products are by far the most affordable. Magnepan speakers are cheaper still, but they don’t offer the performance, constructional quality or sophistication of the Diptyques. For real-world customers looking to get into panel speakers, the Diptyque range occupies the sweet-spot when it comes to price versus performance. As the flagship, the Reference II faces more competition, but also promises the performance benefits to meet that challenge.
Getting started…
I’ve covered the niceties of Reference II set-up already and in some detail https://gy8.eu/blog/diptyque-reference-ii-loudspeakers/. That article mentions but doesn’t cover two upgrade options that are critical to achieving the best possible performance from the big Diptyques: the availability of a bi-wirable crossover and substituting a Neodio Origine B2 foot for the supplied, solid aluminium item. It’s probably also worth mentioning that the front and rear panels on the speaker, which come in off-white or dark-grey as standard, can be special ordered in any of 160 RAL colours – something worth considering when a speaker has this big a visual impact.
I ran the Reference IIs, single-wired, with a variety of different amplifiers, including the ASR Emitter II Exclusive HV, the Kora CSA-1200 mono-blocs, the VTL S-400 II and the CH Precision M1.1 in stereo and mono-bloc configuration. The speakers’ sound was characterised by the scale of their expansive soundstage, the sense of coherent acoustic and the dimensionality of the instrumental and vocal images produced. It’s testament to their considerable bandwidth as well as the sheer size of the panels. Diptyque specify a -3dB point at 22Hz for the speaker, and although measuring di-poles is something of a dark-art (at least if you want results that allow meaningful comparison to box speakers) while in-room response will also vary considerably, the sheer volume of the acoustic space the speakers generate supports the claim. Yet, no matter what I did with placement, I constantly struggled to achieve the immediacy, dynamic range and discrimination to match the scale and presence of the spatial presentation. The sound was certainly big, but it was also distant. The flat 4Ω load will help amplifiers respond to the speakers’ power demands, but the 89dB sensitivity sounds generous in practice – not so much in terms of level, but the nature of the sound produced. By far the best results I achieved with a single stereo amplifier (or mono-blocs) was with the VTL S-400 II whose unburstable musical enthusiasm and sheer grunt produced greater life and dynamics, presence and musical contrast from the Reference IIs, leaving the other available options sounding uncharacteristically flat and sat-on.
