Speaker Asylum: REVIEW: Dynaudio Special Twenty-Five Speakers by ephemere

Model:	Special Twenty-Five
Category:	Speakers
Suggested Retail Price:	$4800
Description:	25th anniversary edition, 8
Manufacturer URL:	Dynaudio
Model Picture:	View

Review by ephemere ( A ) on March 24, 2003 at 14:06:17
IP Address: 138.72.18.57

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I'm about to sign off from AA, but before I depart I wanted to sum up my latest impressions of the Dynaudio Special 25. I've owned the Special 25 for almost two months, and I had originally intended to post a review after yet another month or two. This review augments Steve K's review from several months ago.
Steve K summarized the packaging and so forth. I'll add that I'm quite pleased with the fit and finish. The quality of the veneer work is clearly far superior to another speaker I owned at the same price point. It also looks a lot better in the living room than either my wife or I imagined it would from the showroom. We initially didn't like the somewhat funky birch finish, but now we like it. Our decorator likes it, too, and wants to "incorporate it" into the decor.
All listening was done without the bungs and with the grilles on. I'm a little nuts about protecting the drivers. I did take the grilles off once, and the top end did seem a bit more open. As you'll see, though, I'm more than happy with the sound as it is.
The Special 25 takes a very long time to break in. Out of the box, they sound clear, but thin -- transparent, but with no weight or body. The bass was almost nonexistent. After almost two months, the sound is extraordinarily different. The bass took a long time to open up, but the midrange has become fuller, as well. During the first 100-200 hours, the speaker changed its identity from a minimonitor to a much better balanced full-range speaker. And in fact I believe that my speakers are still improving in this direction. When you audition the Special 25, it is crucial that you make sure that the review sample is fully broken in. Among Dynaudio's speakers, I auditioned the Contour 1.3SE, the Special 25, and the Confidence C2. I found the Special 25 to be much more similar to the C2 than to the 1.3SE.
I have a very large and varied music collection, and so accuracy, resolution, and transparency are crucial qualities for me. Any coloration will be ruthlessly revealed over time with a large sample space of recordings. I don't believe in speakers that are good only for one type of music or another. One recording that I found very useful for differentiating speakers is Steven Osborne's recording of solo piano music by Nikolai Kapustin ( Hyperion CDA67159 ). Kapustin's jazz-inspired music is lively and quixotic, but the engineering puts a wet blanket over the sound. I've found that only the most accurate and resolving systems can pull that blanket off, or at least show it for what it is. The Avantgarde Duo/Nagra system did the best job, but the Dynaudio speakers also passed the test.
The resolution of the Special 25 amazes me, and will probably continue to amaze me for some months until I start to take it for granted. I'll put on a jazz remaster that I've listened to countless times on various systems, and all of a sudden it becomes clear as day that they slapped some artificial reverb on it. I mean, you can't ignore it if you try. The ability to hear hall ambiance so clearly is quite remarkable, on almost every recording I put on. For instance, a solo flute will play a single note, and when the note stops the hall decay sounds effortlessly realistic. Cymbal decay is extended and frighteningly real. I could go on giving examples for pages about how utterly resolving and transparent this speaker is, disc after disc, without end. It's hard for me to imagine it getting any better, although I'm sure it can. It always can.
As opposed to small ensemble music, such as chamber music and jazz, I've always found large orchestral music, large choral music, and opera to be a major letdown in audio systems, even ultra-expensive reference systems. Nothing comes anywhere close to the sheer dimensional scale of the true live experience. Even the best systems can't help but to sound small and somehow not all there. Perhaps it's impossible for a 2-channel CD ever to come close to that experience in a living room. Nevertheless, I am quite pleased with the Special 25's performance on large-scale music. Orchestral and choral music, even going at full tilt, rarely sounds like it's overloading the speaker's ability to resolve the strands of the performance. I know Ricardo Chailly's recording of Schoenberg's Gurreleider very well, and it was a whole new experience with the Special 25. Instead of the crescendos just sounding loud , they now sound layered , with little congestion. It becomes much clearer exactly how Schoenberg weaves the strands of the orchestra together to achieve an effect that is so much more than raw dynamics. I used to like to listen to classical music with a score in my lap. It's amazing how much more a piece of music makes sense when using the score to follow the ebbing and flowing of the themes and the development of the themes throughout the orchestra. I have found that the Special 25 achieves the remarkable feat of almost replacing the score. For instance, as I was listening to a disc of some late Haydn piano trios (Beux Arts Trio, on Philips), it became so clear when Haydn stopped using the cello simply to double up on the piano and violin and started writing more of an independent cello line. I mean, it should be pretty obvious when you hear it, but somehow the Special 25 takes you by the collar and says "listen to this !" This is a wonderful thing.
Another quality of the Special 25 that has really stood out over time is that it is so relaxed and easy to listen to. Several people coming over to listen to my system have commented on this. It seems like a paradox that Dynaudio has made a speaker that is so resolving, accurate, and transparent, and yet is so relaxed at the same time. Before the Special 25, if someone described a speaker as "relaxed", I would be immediately inclined against it, figuring that it's a euphonic quality at the expense of resolution and transparency. Yet here is the Special 25, proving me wrong. As far as I can hear, the speaker is adding no grain or harshness. I had to resort to some of the harshest, most crappily engineered 1970s rock CDs to make the Special 25 sound unpleasant. Now that I've lived with the Special 25s for a couple months, I realize how important it is for speakers to be relaxed, and how much I had written that off before. In practice, it means that I can pull any average-engineered jazz recording out of my collection, crank it up to a high volume, and eat dinner in the next room with a pretty good illusion of live music, rather than a loud stereo that gets obnoxious during fortes. It also means that I can do serious listening to almost any recording at realistic volume levels without grating unpleasantness at dynamic extremes or longer-term fatigue.
Bass is clearly the limiting factor with these speakers, as its -3dB point is only at 35Hz according to Dynaudio. Yet of the many speakers I auditioned, both less and more expensive, the Special 25 had one of the least compromised bass regions. As I explained above, I value accuracy and transparency above all else, and most of my speaker auditions had severely compromised accuracy in the bass region. The better speakers would sound fine everywhere else, but as soon as there was an attack in the bass region the resulting wash of sound would bring it back home that you're listening to a stereo system, not a musical instrument. This was true even with some speakers that are much more expensive and very highly regarded. To my eternal gratitude, Dynaudio managed to avoid this problem. Down to a point, the bass on my system and in my room sounds realistic. Perhaps it is a bit on the lightweight side, and it does not have full extension, but I find it to be just enough, while sacrificing very little in accuracy, resolution, and transparency. Jazz and acoustic combos are quite pleasing, with a tactile quality to the bass that goes deep and is very much there, again a bit on the lightweight side when compared to a live concert. Soft organ pedals that one feels realistically in one's body are excellent at demonstrating the bass resolution and quality at low volumes. Orchestral bass, often so troublesome, again seems realistic, with very little distortion. I must be lucky with my room. I also attribute some of the credit to the TacT DAC/amp.
Placement notes and soundstaging. I have my speakers on Dynaudio sand-filled Stand2 stands placed out about 3.5' from the back wall and 2.5' from the side wall. They're about 9' apart. I've tried listening anywhere between 5' and 12' away from the midpoint between the speakers, all to good effect. In a speaker review, I find it much more difficult to talk about soundstaging than to talk about accuracy and the other factors I've discussed above. Some of my recordings produce an absolutely stunning soundstage regardless of where I sit, while others are terrible. For example, even sitting very close to the speakers, the BIS recording of the original version of Sibelius's violin concerto produces a soundstaging effect where everything sounds naturally placed (no spotmiking and mixing) and extends well behind the back wall, with the speakers utterly disappearing even if you stare at them and try to make the sound come from them. But could it be even better? I'm not sure what "better" means. So much is dependent upon the recording. I don't care much for the overly spot-miked sound, even if everything is positioned exactly where it should be in the soundstage. I suppose the bottom line for the Special 25 is that it clearly delineates the difference between these engineering techniques. Soundstaging is in some sense just a special case of that. And the speakers do disappear on the recordings that allow them to disappear.
These speakers are rated at 88dB sensitivity, with impedance that does not dip below 4.1 ohms and a long-term power-handling capacity of at least 200W. I'm driving these with a TacT S2150 digital amp rated at 300Wpc into 4 ohms. I've never had the power rail of the TacT's PWM stage turned up above -20dB. That suggests that I have never put more than 3W in each speaker. This has generated extremely loud music. I don't think these speakers are difficult at all to drive.
For me the 25-year warranty was a very important bonus. I'll probably be keeping these speakers for a long long time, and it's important to know that Dynaudio is committed to supporting this model for so long. Of course, they could go out of business or be acquired, but I've had so much esoteric audio equipment cheese out on me over the years, and this is about the closest you can get to a sure promise of support.
These speakers are the only audio purchase of any kind I've ever made (over 15 years) that didn't disappoint me in one way or another almost immediately. It's now two months, and I'm waiting for my first disappointment. I'm starting to think it's not coming.

Product Weakness: Bass, while extremely accurate, is not fully extended, and some may find it a bit on the lightweight side before it rolls off.
Product Strengths: Almost unmatched resolution, accuracy, and transparency, yet superbly relaxed and unfatiguing -- a rare combination at any price.

Associated Equipment for this Review:
Amplifier:	TacT S2150 (digital in)
Preamplifier (or None if Integrated):
Sources (CDP/Turntable):	Philips DVD763SA (transport only)
Speakers:	(see above)
Cables/Interconnects:	yes
Music Used (Genre/Selections):	classical, jazz, techno
Room Size (LxWxH):	31 x 15 x 9
Time Period/Length of Audition:	2 months
Type of Audition/Review:	Product Owner

Product Weakness:	Bass, while extremely accurate, is not fully extended, and some may find it a bit on the lightweight side before it rolls off.
Product Strengths:	Almost unmatched resolution, accuracy, and transparency, yet superbly relaxed and unfatiguing -- a rare combination at any price.