Whether or not you’ve ever sat down in front of a pair of Dynaudio speakers, you’ve likely been exposed to the brand’s influence. If you found yourself sitting in a Volvo with the premium sound option in the aughts, you were listening to Dynaudio speakers. Ditto Volkswagens a few years later. More recently, the freaking Bugatti Veyron boasts a Dynaudio sound system (although I’m guessing not a lot of Access readers are riding around in Bugattis on the reg). The company also used to sell its drivers to DIY speaker builders, though those days are long gone. But still, it points to the fact that this is one of the few speaker brands out there making its own drivers. And many of the world’s top recording studios, including the Hit Factory, rely on Dynaudio professional monitors. All of which means that a little entry-level floorstanding tower speaker such as the Dynaudio Emit 30 ($849.50 each, all prices USD) has a heck of a lot of pedigree behind it.
As I said in my unboxing, the Emit 30 is a petite floorstander, measuring just 36.25″ tall without spikes installed and just over 6.75″ wide. Packed into that slim cabinet is a 2.5-way loudspeaker, which might need a bit of explaining for some of you who are newer to hi-fi. What that means is that it has two midrange-woofers—in this case 5.5″ magnesium-silicate polymer cones—both of which play as low as the speaker will play, one of which is low-passed at 1000Hz (much, much higher than most 2.5-way designs I’ve seen in the past), and the other of which is low-passed at 3500Hz with a second-order filter. The upper end of the audible spectrum is handled by a 1.1″ soft-dome tweeter with an inner dome that Dynaudio calls Hexis, which “shapes airflow to smooth-out the frequency response and eliminate unwanted resonances that would affect high-frequency performance.” The tweeter is high-passed, also at 3500Hz, with a first-order filter.
Beyond the tech specs, the Emit 30 is a gorgeous little speaker, especially finished in walnut, as my review samples were. Black and white finishes are also available, although all three have a black baffle that’s sculpted and beveled . . . and unfortunately a bit of a fingerprint magnet. Stashing a microfiber cleaning cloth nearby is a must with this little head-turner.
Dynaudio reports frequency response of 55Hz to 25kHz (±3dB) with a -6dB point of 39Hz, which is substantially lower than you might expect at first glance. The speaker features dual rear-firing bass-reflex ports and has a sensitivity rating of 88dB (2.83v/1m). Nominal impedance is listed as 4 ohms, and the Emit 30 can reportedly handle up to 180W of power.
Setting up and dialing in the Dynaudio Emit 30
As mentioned in my unboxing blog post, the speaker comes with optional spikes that I decided not to use because (1) I don’t need them, and (2) I figured the lack thereof would make positioning the speaker easier. Given the size of the cabinet and the dual rear-firing ports, I set aside the better part of an afternoon to install and tweak the positioning of the speakers. But in the end, I didn’t need to play around with forward/backward placement much at all, and only had to spend a few minutes tinkering with toe-in and tweaking the spread of the speakers. I had to place them a bit farther apart than I normally would at this seating distance.
The biggest bugbear in terms of setup, though, proved to be the height of the speaker. The tweeter is around 34″ off the floor, and my normal ear height in this room is closer to 43″—or 42″ with a bit of effort. Normally not a problem, but in listening to some pink noise through the Emit 30s and moving my head around, I got the sense pretty quickly that the acoustic center of the speaker is below the tweeter. A few paperback novels tucked under the front of the cabinets helped a little, but I still wish I had some short speaker stands, along the lines of IsoAcoustics’ Apertas.
At any rate, the paperbacks, combined with lowering my seat all the way, got the tweeter at least firing at my ears instead of way below them, so they stayed in place for the duration of the review.
I used a pair of pre-terminated SVS SoundPath Ultra speaker cables to connect the Emit 30s to my reference NAD C 3050 BluOS-D integrated amplifier, and although I briefly flirted with a 2.1 setup simply to make sure the speakers would integrate well with a sub, I did all of my critical listening in a pure two-channel configuration.
How does the Emit 30 perform?
There’s one thing I want to make sure I reiterate and clarify right from the get-go: despite everything I said above about lean-back and tweeter height and paperback novels, the vertical dispersion of the Emit 30 isn’t bad. Even with my head significantly above the level of the tweeter, the sound wasn’t drastically different from what I was hearing with my ears at tweeter-level, and as I moved my head up and down by even as much as a foot, I heard none of the lenticular-sounding lobing I got from the Atlantic Technology AT-3.
The reason I suspected at first that there may be vertical dispersion issues is because the instant I cued up “Change” from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s brilliant psychedelic jazz synth-pop concept album Changes (24-bit/48kHz FLAC, KGLW / Qobuz), something sounded decidedly different, and it took me a bit to figure it out.
The song starts with a rhythmic pattern tapped out by drummer Michael Cavanagh (aka “Cavs”) on the hi-hat. And look, I hate to be that guy, given how notoriously short acoustic memory is, but my wife is a drummer and I dabble around with some percussion myself. I know what a hi-hat sounds like. And “Change,” despite some stylistic stuff going on with the vocals and a few of the instruments, features a tonally lifelike recording of the hi-hat, albeit a little dynamically compressed. Through the Emit 30, though, Cavs’ rat-a-tatting sounds muffled, veiled, muted, constrained.
It took me some time and a lot of listening to figure out that—to my ears and brain, at least—what I was hearing was an overall recess in the speaker’s frequency response that starts around 1kHz and extends to maybe 5 or 6kHz, although I’m guessing it’s closer to 5k (my ear-fu isn’t strong enough to pinpoint frequencies much more precisely than that).
Within that overall recess, I also perceived an even more pronounced loss of energy relative to the rest of the audible spectrum somewhere between maybe 3 and 4kHz. And something funky was also going on in the neighborhood of 10kHz, although that’s harder to pin down so specifically because I’m a silverback.
Skipping forward two tracks (same album, but this time via vinyl, KGLW-031-LP), the song “Astroturf” was another good aid in helping me figure out what it was that kept me from fully vibing with the Emit 30, because the flutes that are so prominent in this mix also sounded different from what I expected in several distinct ways. And here, it wasn’t so much the fundamental frequencies as it was, I think, the first and second harmonics that got a bit buried relative to the fundamental. Overall, what’s in fact a multitracked flute sounded like a single instrument (and honestly, more of a synthesized one than a real one) buried a little deeper in the music, which made it sound like a different mix altogether.
A less-specific but, in my opinion, more consequential observation is that both songs—the whole album, in fact—sounded constrained and constricted in terms of overall soundstage, which I strongly suspect is a consequence of this more laid-back presentation of the midrange frequencies and especially in the upper treble. The soundstage barely extended past the physical location of the cabinets themselves, and soundstage height was practically nonexistent.
Now let me be clear about something: the reason I’m picking these nits is because otherwise the Emit 30 does so much right. I think anyone reading the above who knows much about speaker design will immediately point a finger at the crossover, and yet I’m not hearing a lot of the phase and lobing issues I would expect to hear as a result of a less-than-optimal crossover design. Are they simply being masked by something else? It’s possible, but I’m ignorant about what that might be.
Moreover, the all-important bass frequencies are handled beautifully for a speaker of this size at this price point. If there are any lumps in the response between, say, 50Hz and 200Hz, I was not hearing them. With “Crystalline” from Björk’s Biophilia (16/44.1 FLAC, One Little Independent Records / Qobuz), I thought the Emit 30s handled the shockingly musical yet hard-hitting dubstep bass line every bit as well as my much larger and costlier Paradigm Studio 100s do. The dynamics of the bass were beautifully delivered, along with its tonal nuances and the overall texture of the beat.
Here’s another important consideration, and one that will result in my being forced to drink a few glasses of haterade from the purist crowd: with a gentle application of room correction, most of the issues I have with the Emit 30 were ameliorated to one degree or another. I ran Dirac Live on my NAD C 3050, and I ran it full-bandwidth, which I almost never do. The results were, in short, shocking.
I’m normally of a mind that if there’s anything I’d change about a speaker’s performance above, say, 1000Hz, it’s probably best not to try fixing it with DSP. But in this case, it worked, which makes me suspect that the directivity index of the speaker won’t look bad when we get the measurements back. The only thing it didn’t really fix were the issues I heard somewhere in the neighborhood of 10kHz, and the soundstage height issues that resulted.
So take all of that for what you will. If you tend to find most speakers too bright—and you wouldn’t believe the number of emails I’ve gotten from people who proclaim that they just cannot stand the sound of my beloved Paradigms because of their brightness—you might find a lot to like here. But I think most people will find that the overall tonal balance of the speaker is improved by at least two parametric EQ filters, or maybe three if you want to address the issues around and above 10kHz.
This isn’t the place for me to get into whether or not that’s the right solution. All I can say is this: After running Dirac, you can take everything I said above and bin it. The Emit 30 is, with a bit of DSP assistance, a well-balanced speaker with good horizontal dispersion, a slim profile, oodles of well-behaved bass, and a lovely finish.
What other similar speakers should you consider?
This is a tough one, because if you’re looking for a speaker with a distinctive voice, it’s not easy to figure out what sort of distinctive voice you might like. Honestly, your best bet is to find a hi-fi shop that does demos and will let you bring your own tunes.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking for something more neutral that doesn’t outright need EQ, and you’ve got your heart set on a small floorstanding loudspeaker, a few options in this price range that I really like are the Monitor Audio Bronze 500 6G ($825 each), the new KEF Q7 Meta ($899 each), and the Focal Theva N°2 (also $899 each).
TL;DR: Should you buy the Dynaudio Emit 30?
Hoo boy. It should be clear from all of the above that, although I love a lot about what Dynaudio is doing with the Emit 30, it does not embody the sort of safe, cookie-cutter, by-the-books tuning that I prefer. When I want excitement and idiosyncrasy, I want it coming from the DAW or mixing console, not my transducers. But what originally put the speaker on my radar was a post on Reddit from a user who bought a pair and loved them. And I’m not here to yuck anybody’s yum.
This is the tricky thing about speakers that go off-script, whether it be in terms of driver configuration, materials, or—as I suspect is going on here—crossover design. You might like the Emit 30. You might not. And there’s just no way to tell. Whereas a speaker that measures more typically is probably going to be enjoyed by most people in a blind listening test.
Based on what I’ve heard of the Emit 30 and the Totem Acoustic Loon, which I reviewed last month, I’m going out on a limb and guess that the measurements of the Emit 30 will look better on the balance sheet, once we get both back from the NRC. And yet, I liked the Loons and just didn’t vibe with the sound of the Emit 30s. The dips in the Emit 30’s response simply bothered me more, due to their magnitude and the specific frequencies involved.
At the end of the day, I don’t want you to let this review scare you off of Dynaudio’s gorgeous little floorstander if you’re interested in it, because, again, there’s a lot I do like about it. And you might love it yourself. But this is simply a speaker you have to hear to know if you’ll dig it.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Integrated amp: NAD C 3050 BluOS-D
- Speaker cables: SVS SoundPath Ultra
- Turntable: U-Turn Audio Orbit Theory with Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge
- Power conditioner: SurgeX XR115
Dynaudio Emit 30 loudspeaker
Price: $849.50 each
Warranty: Eight years, parts and labor
Dynaudio A/S
Sverigesvej 15
8660 Skanderborg
Denmark
Phone: +45 8652-3411
North America:
Dynaudio North America
1852 Elmdale Avenue
Glenview, IL 60026
Phone: (847) 730-3280
Website: www.dynaudio.com
