Devialet Silver Phantom

The longest dimension on this thing is 13 inches. 3000 Watts. 16Hz bottom end, at 105dB. Reviewers not given to getting blown away are stunned at how incredible and unbelievably good they sound. There is the warning sign of technologies anagram-laden and stupidly named, e.g.-- HBI®-Heart Bass Implosion and ACE (Active Co-Spherical Engine).

Anyone heard of these, or better, heard? I came across a review in MaximumPC, where the editors are not given to hyperbolic reviews yet raved repeatedly. There is the expected catch of high price, but nothing like the esoterics, a mere $2500 or so. You can check them out at their website, read their WhitePaper, or a review in Wired.

Any audiophile will know of a long line of such wild claims that usually amount to nothing, but the reviews shouldn't be ignored, I haven't seen anything like these reactions that I can remember. Getting that kind of deep and loud bass out of a speaker that size just about unheard of, I don't think any of those high-powered cubes could come close to 105 dB @ 16 Hz. if any of them reach that low, though I don't recall any of their specs off hand.

This what the Wired reviewer had to say:

After sampling Tidal tracks on the Phantom for a week, one thing is glaringly obvious: This thing is worth every euro-converted dollar that you scrape and claw for in this godforsaken and cutthroat world. Yes, it sounds that good. Exactly how good is “that”? ... The only way to experience such an otherworldly sound is to sit in Row C, Seat 107 at Carnegie Hall precisely 45 minutes after dropping a tab of acid.

Anyone have any thoughts?

crank wrote:
Anyone have any thoughts?

Sure. What happens if you drop acid and listen to the speakers?

ScholasticSpastic wrote:

crank wrote:
Anyone have any thoughts?

Sure. What happens if you drop acid and listen to the speakers?

First off, quit being so damn clumsy and pick up the acid off the floor. Then eat it. Through one of those weird inversions of logic, the speakers will induce sobriety if you put on Dark Side of the Moon and crank up the volume.

Yep, play it backwards and the recite the Lord's Prayer.

At 105dB! I have severe chronic tinnitus and I dont wish it on any one.

You don't have to crank it up at all times! Well recorded music or movies will have a wide dynamic range, the real loud bits will be pretty brief, well, usually, a lot of movies won't folloow this. But I know what you mean, when the tinnitus started with me, it made me far more sensitive to loud noises, especially poorly reproduced sound. Which is why good audio equipment that you don't overdrive is important. If anyone looked at any of the links, this thing employs a huge amount of feedback, active source to output correction, so you can crank it up and it will never distort significantly. Or so it claims. Overdriven amps pump out a shitload of harsh treble and drive my ears crazy.

The 'audiophile' crowd seem a bit sniffy about this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/com ... _devialet/

Thanks for the link. While it's interesting to hear the various opinions, a couple of things jumped out at me. First, who the fuck relies on a streaming source for serious testing? Do any guarantee the quality of the stream? And the OP mentioned going through a ChromeCast device, what does it do to the audio? I'm very leary of opinions by anyone using such sources. Testing deep bass output is not all that easy, few sources have much to tax a sub with, very little below 30 Hz, or even 50 Hz for a lot of available music, this isn't true of a lot of electronica, but most rock doesn't have all that much deep bass, it can have a lot of bass, but it isn't all that deep.

The system I enjoy now thanks to burning my house down includes a sub that can go cleanly down to about 15 Hz and below, and SVS PB13-Ultra. The sublime qualities of such depths have ruined me to more normal systems. Most folk who love bass get excited when they hear something that can crank out serious 30 Hz content, I know, I was one of them, but the difference is striking when you're hearing serious output from there on down into the infrasonics. If you're feeling your clothes vibrating against your skin, that's a lot of bass, but not a lot of deep bass. When you feel your guts shaking, you're in serious bass territory then.

The other thing I question is how many of these guys are of the 'Stereophile' type of audiophile, and how many are the Audio, or The Audio Critic type-a Floyd E. Toole type.

Exactly what are you listening to that requires low end rumble of that sort? The kind of sub bass you feel rather than experience is limited to a handful of genres. Unless you're really into dubstep and organ music, or you want to stage a haunting and terrify your neighbours with loud infrasound, this thing is stupidly over engineered for most purposes.

Audio reviews are pretty well useless. Everything is the absolute best thing they've ever heard and worth every penny, if they are to be believed.

electricwhiteboy wrote:Exactly what are you listening to that requires low end rumble of that sort? .

Sometimes hearing isn't the sense that is meant to be stimulated

Shit in, shit out. Streaming? Really? I don't care how good the speakers are, you need a decent source or you're wasting your money. Plus they look shit.

They claim it handles streaming without distortion.

http://en.devialet.com/phantom/discover#dialog/

Dialog is Phantom’s intelligent hub. It significantly enhances the Phantom experience. With Dialog, enjoy the best online streaming services in HD, including Deezer, Qobuz and TIDAL (and soon many more). Connect Phantom in stereo, Cinema, or multi-room.

Couple of things ( I was in the high end sound industry for a good long while, have been at the NCR Speaker Lab when Floyd Toole helped invent the Canadian speaker industry in Ottawa etc and hobnobbed with the elite high end audio manufacturers for many years ).

Streaming that they are taking about is a lossless streaming system so that's not a downside.

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/audio- ... 607/review

Nothing in the tech is without valid acoustic engineering principals
https://www.wired.com/2015/06/review-de ... phantom-2/

This is a critical tech

SAM (Speaker Active Matching): This is pretty genius. Devialet engineers analyze a speaker. Then they tweak the amp’s signal to match that speaker. To quote the company literature: “Using a specific driver integrated into the processor of the Devialet, SAM deduces in real time the exact signal that has to be transmitted to the speaker to precisely reproduce the exact acoustic pressure recorded by the microphone.”
Audio nonsense? Not completely. This tech works so well that many of the pricey speaker brands—Wilson, Sonus Faber, B&W, and Kef, to name a few—pair their swaggy boxes with Devialet amps at audio shows. This same SAM

this is a fair assessment

Sound Quality
After sampling Tidal tracks on the Phantom for a week, one thing is glaringly obvious: This thing is worth every euro-converted dollar that you scrape and claw for in this godforsaken and cutthroat world. Yes, it sounds that good. Exactly how good is “that”? Does the Phantom really sound “1,000 times superior to current systems,” as that crazy Devialet website blurb says it does? No. The only way to experience such an otherworldly sound is to sit in Row C, Seat 107 at Carnegie Hall precisely 45 minutes after dropping a tab of acid.

Question deux: Does the Phantom sound as good as an Editor’s Choice $50,000 stereo system, featuring a gaggle of components, oxygen-free python cables, and monolith speakers? No.
But the disparity isn’t a chasm; it’s more like a small gap. What can be said with certainty is this: The Phantom is a technological tour de force. There’s no other system on the market that puts out this kind of sound for this kind of money. That it can be toted around from one room to another, like a revolving art show, is a small miracle.

There is nothing in acoustic physics that does not makes sense and new materials, CAD and chips can produce sonic wonders.

There is a lot of nonsense voodoo in high end audio. Does the company over hype the product ?? Yep as the Wired article indicates fairly.

Would you be impressed with the sound on a lossless high sample rate source?? ....damn right.

Macdoc wrote:Couple of things ( I was in the high end sound industry for a good long while, have been at the NCR Speaker Lab when Floyd Toole helped invent the Canadian speaker industry in Ottawa etc and hobnobbed with the elite high end audio manufacturers for many years ).

Streaming that they are taking about is a lossless streaming system so that's not a downside.

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/audio- ... 607/review

Nothing in the tech is without valid acoustic engineering principals
https://www.wired.com/2015/06/review-de ... phantom-2/

This is a critical tech

SAM (Speaker Active Matching): This is pretty genius. Devialet engineers analyze a speaker. Then they tweak the amp’s signal to match that speaker. To quote the company literature: “Using a specific driver integrated into the processor of the Devialet, SAM deduces in real time the exact signal that has to be transmitted to the speaker to precisely reproduce the exact acoustic pressure recorded by the microphone.”
Audio nonsense? Not completely. This tech works so well that many of the pricey speaker brands—Wilson, Sonus Faber, B&W, and Kef, to name a few—pair their swaggy boxes with Devialet amps at audio shows. This same SAM

this is a fair assessment

Sound Quality
After sampling Tidal tracks on the Phantom for a week, one thing is glaringly obvious: This thing is worth every euro-converted dollar that you scrape and claw for in this godforsaken and cutthroat world. Yes, it sounds that good. Exactly how good is “that”? Does the Phantom really sound “1,000 times superior to current systems,” as that crazy Devialet website blurb says it does? No. The only way to experience such an otherworldly sound is to sit in Row C, Seat 107 at Carnegie Hall precisely 45 minutes after dropping a tab of acid.

Question deux: Does the Phantom sound as good as an Editor’s Choice $50,000 stereo system, featuring a gaggle of components, oxygen-free python cables, and monolith speakers? No.
But the disparity isn’t a chasm; it’s more like a small gap. What can be said with certainty is this: The Phantom is a technological tour de force. There’s no other system on the market that puts out this kind of sound for this kind of money. That it can be toted around from one room to another, like a revolving art show, is a small miracle.

There is nothing in acoustic physics that does not makes sense and new materials, CAD and chips can produce sonic wonders.

There is a lot of nonsense voodoo in high end audio. Does the company over hype the product ?? Yep as the Wired article indicates fairly.

Would you be impressed with the sound on a lossless high sample rate source?? ....damn right.

It isn't really clear they were talking about this lossless system of streaming, if that's the case, my objections on that end would disappear.

And SAM sounds like a servo-feedback system, but a priori, no actual feedback, just the calculated difference signal for whatever the input is. Active feedback would be better, certainly at least as good assuming their engineering was perfect. And it's been around for decades. If it were that simple, why hasn't everyone gone to that? I know a number of systems have used real feedback control of woofers/subwoofers, velodyne in particular, yet, even with today's drastic drop in prices for massive compute power, I don't hear of lots of speakers employing it, there are clearly difficulties. E.g., you're still stuck with issues of the microphone needed to sample the output for comparison to the source material and how to use that signal to generate the proper feedback required. Maybe they've mastered the tech and that would be great, but no amount of feedback-correction can induce a driver to output sound it is physically incapable of producing. Realistic levels of deep bass require moving a lot of air, a smaller speaker can't do that without some seriously ridiculous peak-to-peak travel of the cone or whatever is used as the air moving surface.

I'd really like to get a couple of them to live with for a while, see how I feel about them. What you say about audio reviews is pretty much spot on, but that said, the widespread raving, about these speakers is unprecedented as far as I'm aware, especially in the way this raving is done, how they're qualities are described

electricwhiteboy wrote:Exactly what are you listening to that requires low end rumble of that sort? The kind of sub bass you feel rather than experience is limited to a handful of genres. Unless you're really into dubstep and organ music, or you want to stage a haunting and terrify your neighbours with loud infrasound, this thing is stupidly over engineered for most purposes.

I agree with you about the rarity of such deep bass in music, it's what I said in the post, but I like a lot of that type music, plus, most speakers bottom out by 30 Hz, a speaker that can go to 15 isn't bottoming out at 30, it can produce that deep bass very cleanly and loudly, which isn't true of most speakers, even most speakers considered to be very good. On top of that, it's movies/video/TV where they get most of their workout. And it can be a sublime experience. Some movies just don't work very well without a good sound system, it's that important, though most don't realize it. I've walked out of lots of movies when the projection system or the print was crap, but also when the sound system wasn't up to the job. It can make a phenomenal difference in the experience. Just listening to something like a news broadcast off the street, where there is an unseen large truck, off-camera but the sound is picked up, it makes me think there's a large truck outside my house, a system without powerful deep bass won't confuse your brain that way.

Here's a cool track for sub-freaks, from Bass Outlaws, they specialize in such stuff. And a nice track from Erykah Badu, Rimshot, that just doesn't sound as good without the extended bass. Plus, the theme song to Archer really benefits, not the same without the impact a good sub gives it. Unfortunately, these are of questionable quality, and I'm not even sure if anyone will get the same file I do even with the same URL???? You really need the originals, or a FLAC rip.

Erm, 3kW? I presume that is peak and not rms.

So what is the rms music power output? 3kW is totally meaningless. (You might as well turn off the heating when playing that thing ).

And I agree with CB. So there!

What cables would you use?

These Rip-off Merchants?

Mains cables at £200 a go, speaker cables at £1,100 per metre.

There was a well known blind test, oh, many years ago, where audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between 'custom' speaker cables and a 13 Amp mains cable used to connect to the speakers...

I long ago gave up trying to move air accurately around a variety of room shapes and simply went to where the engineers are ...with accurate pro cans on my head.

A system sealed to your ear canal eliminates all the hoop jumping that speakers entail and requires little power so a $99 tube headphone amp sounds glorious. I put together an OPPO DVD player, $99 tube headphone amp and my Pro Sennheisers for a glorious sound experience.

As to cabling for speakers - 12 gauge is fine and what we used to sell against the rip-off crowd.

Alan B wrote:Erm, 3kW? I presume that is peak and not rms.

So what is the rms music power output? 3kW is totally meaningless. (You might as well turn off the heating when playing that thing ).

And I agree with CB. So there!

Without 3KW, your snoots are anemic! In a sense, the rms vs peak distinction is somewhat meaningless in a speaker, the sound is going to be peaky, though these days, they compress even CDs rather horribly, with probably 20dB total dynamic range being common, maybe even high. You could translate that to a high-power output of 30-3000 W dynamic range. With a speaker as inefficient as this one is going to be, you need a lot of juice to make it woof.

In the 'there's never enough bass' department, tomorrow they're delivering my new SVS sub, their newest offering, the PB16-Ultra I pre-ordered about a month ago.


Its amplifier is 1KW RMS, 5KW peak. There are plugs to go in the 3 ports at the bottom, giving you a range of responses, which look like:
15-280 Hz +/- 3 dB (standard mode)
13-280 Hz +/- 3 dB (extended mode)
14-360 Hz +/- 3 dB (sealed mode)

Weighing in at 174 lbs, it's a beast. And it will be playing with it's older brother, it's only 1KW/3.6KW. The rest of the system is fed by 6ch amp with near 500 W per ch, RMS continuous all channels driven, the 2 fronts and 2 rears have 455 W subs built in, the center ch has a 300 W sub built in. Fortunately, there are no neighbors near by. The whole thing uses 1 20 A 220 V circuit for the amp, and two 20 A 120 V circuits in the 3-wire configuration where the two come off both sides of the 220 and share the neutral so it will carry little current, limiting the voltage drop. So about 4 KW, 10KW peak. And of course it isn't ever drawing 10KW of power, nowhere near, the circuits would all blow. The sound is quite peaky, channels don't peak simultaneously, and the brief high-power excursions are brief enough to get past circuit breakers. Is that overkill? A little, but I like dynamic, deep bass that makes my guts vibrate, so sue me!