Great sound is never an accident. An excellent loudspeaker owes its performance to design, material selection, and construction, grounded in the fundamentals of physics, acoustics and psychoacoustics, which govern the behaviour of sound and how we hear. DALI uses the following 8 principles to guide the design and construction of every loudspeaker it produces:
Individually Crafted: every DALI loudspeaker is individually assembled and rigorously tested before it leaves the production line. A great loudspeaker depends, not only on design, but also on the precision with which that design is executed. The skill of craftspeople, high quality materials, components, assembly processes and workmanship are critical. Attention to the most minute detail, and rigorous testing also contribute to ensuring that every DALI speaker realises the full potential of its design.
Low Loss: the selection of low-loss materials and decisions on construction details are fundamental building blocks of all DALI loudspeakers. All energy lost in a loudspeaker is energy supplied by your amplifier that is wasted, producing no useful output. In addition to this inefficiency, the lost energy appears as noise and distortion of the sound signal. It is also is converted to heat in the various components of the loudspeaker, which negatively impacts its performance.
Holographic Sound Imaging: creating a believable soundstage is all about reproducing every single detail in the audio signal, at the right time. The spatial dimension of sound is essential to the perception of reality. The difference between hearing a sound we can recognise, and being immersed in a realistic, 3-D sonic image lies in very many, very low level signal details. These critical details can easily be dissipated by signal loss, destroyed by distortion or masked by noise. Preserving these vital details depends on attention to all phases of loudspeaker construction, from design of the loudspeaker system and its components, to the selection of materials, right through to component production and final assembly.
Time Coherence: ensuring perfect phase between the individual drivers is the key to delivering a realistic 3D sound image. While a loudspeaker’s frequency response justifiably receives considerable attention, sound is also a sequence of transients and tones that vary over time. The use of multiple drivers enables loudspeakers to reproduce a wide frequency range. However, the operation of these drivers must be carefully coordinated to produce sound with the correct timing, which is essential for its faithful audio reproduction.
Wide Dispersion: enjoyment of music and movies are paramount to DALI. Most of the sound we hear is not direct sound, but rather comes from reflections from our environment. Natural sound sources generally radiate sound widely across much of their frequency range. This means that the reflections reaching us have a similar frequency content to the direct sound. Our perceptions of reality and of our environment depend on this combination of direct sound and similar reflected sound. Therefore, we require loudspeakers to also radiate their sound evenly across their frequency range, over a wide area. This wide dispersion of sound also produces a large listening area, so that high-quality sound can be enjoyed by several listeners.
Clarity: clarity in the audio signal is obtained by low loss of information in combination with a smooth and seamless reproduction in both the time and frequency domain. The absence of distortion and noise, and the seamless coordination of the loudspeaker’s drivers is essential if sound is to be reproduced with high fidelity.
Low Resonance Cabinet: all structures vibrate at their resonant frequencies. Resonance of the loudspeaker cabinet produces sound which is not part of the original signal, that is to say, noise. Standing waves within the cabinet are another potential noise source. This noise can mask the critical low level details of the audio signal, destroying accuracy, naturalness and the illusion of reality in the reproduced sound. Therefore, cabinet resonances must be carefully controlled. This requires a balance of damping and stiffness. Too little leads to excessive cabinet resonance, while too much produces flat, lifeless sound. Excessive stiffness can also raise cabinet resonant frequencies into the frequency range to which the ear is most sensitive. Therefore DALI designs its loudspeaker cabinets to reduce standing waves to a minimum. It also focuses on keeping resonances to as low a level as possible, and ensuring that they are in frequency ranges that minimise their negative effects.
Amplifier Optimized: a loudspeaker has two critical interfaces, with the listening room, and with the amplifier driving it. Loudspeakers typically present amplifiers with complex loads, whose impedance varies in both magnitude and phase. However, careful driver and crossover design can minimise the fluctuation in loudspeaker impedance, providing amplifiers with benign loads. This enables them to perform at their best, whatever the design on which they’re based.