Intro
Contents
DaSL… we had never heard of the brand before. And that is not surprising, since it is a new brand from the stable of Rik Stoet. They were first seen and listened to at the Dutch Audio Event 2023. Now we have had them in the listening room for a while. Time for a review.
Dutch Design, Made for Music and Music Comes First, Measurements second. It shows what this speaker stands for: making music. Finding happiness in musical reproduction of your favorite albums. And who doesn’t want that?
BBC as a basis
Now we also see on DaSL’s website that a “BBC report” was grabbed as a first draft. Given the speaker’s design, that wasn’t really hard to guess, of course.
Anyone who has seen our interview with Graham Audio knows that unprecedented amounts of money have been spent in R&D to develop decent studio monitors. In short: the BBC actually measured a lot. That is not to say that the monitors are 100% neutral, because they are not. We all know that they are tuned with the famous “BBC dip”. But this is very well thought out. In a studio, someone either listens near-field, or at most mid-field. And then that BBC dip is particularly pleasant.
By the way, we also measured the DaSL and those measurements looks anything but bad…. thankfully. A speaker that measures completely wack is not desirable either, it seems to us. You can see the details of the measurements in the last chapter.
Bit of engineering
The DaSL is a compact, two-way monitor. Closed. We see a soft-dome tweeter and a paper woofer. The woofer is a special design for DaSL with a giant magnet. (AlNiCo). That should give more grip, control and speed. You can read how that manifests itself in the section on our musical experiences.
The cabinet is quite thin, which again is a concept we know from the BBC monitors. The idea behind this also came up in the interview with Graham. At the rear we see thick, nicely finished terminals that allow bi-wiring and bi-amping. By default, things are connected, allowing you to play single-wire directly.
We have to say: the finish is neat. The cabinet is nicely finished and the terminals look and feel nice and solid. Now with a price of 3300 Euros (3600 Euros for Rosewood and Red Rosewood), it should be. That’s without tripods. With stands, you quickly arrive at 4000 Euro per pair. That’s a serious amount for a pair of speakers.
what exactly is a bbc-dip ?
It’s a slight ‘dip’ in the frequency response between 1 and 4 KHz