DALI: ‘The unpredictability should be in the music, not in the speaker’

Andrew Everard
Friday, November 29, 2024

Andrew Everard relishes some plain speaking on a visit to loudspeaker company DALI in Denmark

DALI CEO Lars Worre is talking about his company’s four decades of history: ‘You may know that we celebrated our 40th anniversary last year – but here’s the truth: we defined our foundation to be 1983. It’s actually made up – don’t tell anyone. We had activities in 1982 with early products, and the DALI name actually came along in 1984. So, we took the average.’

That’s typical of the relaxed, but practical, attitude of a company that’s expanded from speakers being made in the cellar of its founder, Peter Lyngdorf, to a purpose-built factory in a rural location in Nørager, on Denmark’s Jutland peninsula which turns out some 250,000 loudspeakers a year.

The original building on the site is now the company’s wood-processing plant, and also houses a substantial solar energy facility, providing all the operation’s power; meanwhile the heating comes from a plant operating on the burning of all the company’s rubbish, allowing it to claim totally green certification.

Worre, who joined the company as an acoustician in 1991 is clearly proud of the ‘made in Denmark’ thing, but then DALI does stand for Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries. He acknowledges that he’s still an audiophile at heart, and attributes the success of the nation of just 5m people as a powerhouse in the audio industry to the country’s discovery of electromagnetism, its use in the first magnetic sound recorder, and later the electrodynamic loudspeaker driver.

Yes, the company does import some components from China – as does just about every other hi-fi company – but it does so from its own factory. This started out as a quality control operation for the components DALI was sourcing there, but ‘when the amount of QC people there grew beyond 10, we said, “Why don’t we make it ourselves? So, it actually transformed into a manufacturing site, and we have 150 people out there right now. But we sell more Danish-made Dali products in China than we import from our Chinese factory – we call it the trade balance.’

While the company is very much about engineering, its products containing huge amounts of in-house innovation, some comments from Worre show just how much the sound, and musical truth, are the core concerns. ‘We expect all our speakers to be able to recreate a holographic imaging of, uh, let’s say, imaging cues that are in the recordings,’ he says, and: ‘Many of this studio technicians that produce the music we love, they have never heard the three dimensionality of their recordings.’

Warming to his subject, he adds that ‘I’m not talking about sound effects here – I’m talking about stuff that any listener would hear with the same set up with our speakers on the same recording. Time coherence is more like a method to make this happen, but I’d say this industry is filled with people who have their head in frequency responses from morning to evening, and they don’t nail it.

‘Clarity is the goal: we believe perfect sound comes from a speaker that is basically just a midrange with a band, and there’s nothing we hate more than speakers sounding not coherent or like two ways. When you have a speaker that begins to work, there’s no such thing as bass and treble – it’s just a saxophone.’

He’s also critical of speakers whose impedance varies with frequency, making them an unpredictable, and difficult, load for an amplifier: ‘The unpredictability should be in the music, not in the load the speaker presents to the amplifier.’ Another important factor is the dispersion of its drivers, spreading the listening ‘sweet spot’ while maintaining stereo focus: the company believes this should be determined by the speaker, not by the need for the user to experiment with different degrees of toe-in (angling the speakers inward towards the listening position) to achieve it.

As Krestian Pedersen, the company’s head of product management puts it, ‘There’s another thing DALI stands for – it’s “Don’t Angle Loudspeakers Inwards”.’

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