Think of Dynaudio’s Focus 600XD as a first class ticket to great Digital sound rather than just another mighty loudspeaker, and you’re close to understanding its revolutionary nature.
The Focus XD600 is clearly much, much more than a high
quality speaker. To understand why, you’d need to latch on to the fact that
Dynaudio has moved well past the goal posts used by other speaker
manufacturers.
Dynaudio has clearly and rightly realised that most of our
contemporary music is recorded, stored and delivered in Digital mode.
You’ve only got to survey the billions of digitally sourced
soundtracks stored on portable digital devices and home servers notionally to
get a handle that music lovers dig digital.
It’s cool these days to have an entire library of music
stored in the digital domain on a digital storage device of your own choosing.
Hand in hand with this approach to music, is the fact that we’re also
downloading our music from online services at a rate of knots.
Enter Dynaudio and more specifically its fabulous digitally
endowed Focus XD600 fully digital, active loudspeaker. While this sounds like a
mouthful, it’s because – it is what it is.
The XD600 is designed to link easily and directly to a
digital music source. The incoming digital stream is then routed to the digital
amplifiers built into the speakers where they’re processed in the Hi-Res domain
of 24-bits/192kHz.
Importantly the music signal remains in the digital domain
until it arrives at the XD600’s drivers. How’s that for Digital purity right
through the signals journey from source, through to the amplifiers and finally
the speakers.
Connecting the XD600s to digital sources is a cinch – thanks
to high-res capable digital input connections. It takes all of a minute or two
to accomplish this connection.
But Dynaudio is a clever company and in a neat bit of
lateral thinking has catered for all of us vinyl and CD fans by giving the XD600s
RCA analogue inputs. Really whether you’re a digital or analogue diehard or
most probably a fan of both music domains, buying XD600s ensures you’ve covered
all your bases. Most importantly if you’re into wireless music streaming, all
you need to do is simply buy and add the optional Dynaudio Hub ($599) to the
XD600s.
The beauty of the hub is it connects to ALL of your digital
and analogue sources allowing you to send these music streams WIRELESSLY to the
XD600s.
The Focus XD600s in keeping with Dynaudio’s long tradition
of designing and building top flight loudspeakers that sound as good as they
do, because they’re equipped with everything they need to generate a ‘you-are-there-at
the-concert-hall’ listening experience.
Inside each XD600, are a hi-res digital to analogue signal
convertor, high quality electronic crossover to control that the right
frequencies in the right amounts go to the speakers’ specific bass, midrange
and high frequency drivers.
But here’s the thing. Each XD600 also carries four high
definition power amplifiers. One for each of each speaker’s two bass drivers, a
midrange and tweeter.
There’s more: the XD600s are supplied with a remote control
so each has a built-in remote control circuit so you can power the speakers,
switch them off, select digital or analogue, input sources including line in,
coax, optical, USB or one of three Hub sources. You’ve gotta’ love it!
Because the XD600s are powered by their own built-in
amplifiers, they require to connect to a power point via supplied 240V cables.
They also carry a small port labeled ”service” that can be used as the conduit
for upgrades Dynaudio develops up the track making the XD600s a fair bet as a
great future proofed speaker purchase.
Dynaudio is a dab hand at leading edge audio technology, but
it’s also a top rank speaker brand so you’d expect the XD600s to feature
nothing less than pedigree Dynaudio speaker drivers. That’s what you get.
The bass drivers are 180mm models using a costly
thermo-formed MSP (magnesium silicate polymer) cone powered by a 54mm voice
coil wound with wire sourced from pure aluminum. So you end up with a bass
driver that has a light but structurally rigid cone and a voice coil engineered
for signal purity amongst many other parameters.
The just as well endowed midrange driver is a 140mm model
built to the same exacting tolerance and material requirements as the bass
drivers. The tweeter in the XD600s is 27mm soft-domed model that can be
sonically adjusted using a three – way switch located on the rear of the
speakers.
So how do they sound? After tracking down a pair at a
specialist hi-fi retailer, the answer in a word is ”complete”.
Using a wide variety of signal sources-CD, turntable, music
server-the XD600s soared in the high frequencies bolstered by an uncannily
smooth midrange underpinned by prodigious amounts of highly informative, deep
taut bass.
The favourite session of the day and one that had the
store’s consultants and meandering customers flock to the listening room
occurred when we fired up the Roger Water’s seminal album, Amused To Death
using CD and LP as signal sources.
The opening track where the old soldier recalls having to
lead his mate to die in no man’s land in Europe during the WW1, backed by the
haunting guitar riff, left us all gob-smacked by its emotional power.
In the final analysis, the worth or dearth of a component’s
performance rests on its ability to move the listener’s emotions. Judged by
this albeit, subjective but compelling standard, we’d have to rate Dynaudio’s
sleek, powerful, beautifully built XD600 loudspeakers as completely musically
satisfying.
