The Sound

Anyone expecting a mini Phantom S-280… nope… it is not. The S-280 really sounds a bit bigger and clearly has more body and grunt than the M-375. But what we do hear is a similar signature and a full DALI sound. Once again DALI proves that it can just make very good speakers and can also translate that to in-wall. And that is just cool. Because let’s be honest: how beautiful is it to make 5.1 in-wall system? A complete multi-channel system in the wall of your living room? Completely hidden, but ending up in the bubble of music as soon as you press play? That is just awesome!

Dream cinema

How we see this speaker is quite simple: in surround with a nice subwoofer. Because what we do notice is that 60 Hz as the lowest point is not really enough for complete reproduction in film. But then again, that’s what the .1 is for. And we estimate that DALI agrees with us. A good bookshelf goes down to 40 / 45 Hz. Just enough for enough body in the reproduction. It is also about how much power those frequencies are reproduced. A subwoofer can just give much more punch. And that is a must with movies.

But as said: put five of these beautiful built-in speakers in the wall and place one or two subs alongside and get that party started!

If we then listen to this speaker separately, we hear an excellent balance. DALI has mastered the hybrid-tweeter pretty well. We hear no crossover in that point. Although we must say: the crossover in the hybrid is at 15 kHz approximately. That’s also kind of hard to hear with the naked ear. The transition is very slightly visible in the response measurement.

Workroom

We have played with the DALI M-375 for a long time in the study. In the process, all sorts of things were played. From Radio Paradise to Royksopp to Audioslave and quite a bit of classical piano (is a phase right now).

The DALIs like it all, we notice. And so in the background it’s a lovely, non-intrusive speaker that works well with the Yamaha. It is not a difficult load we notice. We estimate that it will also go excellently with the NuPrime IDA-8 or a NAD C399 or something similar. Or of course the surround models from that brand.

Now you can see from the picture that the speakers are quite low in our case. If you build them in-wall, you can of course choose the height. But in our case they are not really ideal. For the listening tests we sat down in our low, lazy chairs and then the tweeter comes at ear height. Point is that – in these chairs – we quite quickly become very lazy and no longer get to work. So it was difficult to find balance. Coffee and listening would often get a bit longer than usual, and that in a time when time was scarce … not ideal, but good for the stress level. Once again, hi-fi / music turns out to be good for health!