Напольная акустика — Davone Audio Reference Two

The Reference Two comes from Davone Audio as a two-way tower drawn up by designer Paul Schenkel, with a UK price of GBP 11,999. It is derived from the larger Reference One and follows the same design approach in a more compact cabinet, pairing a beryllium tweeter with a carbon fibre bass and midrange cone in a curved enclosure of formed plywood.

Key specs that matter

A 7.5 inch driver with a Textreme carbon fibre membrane covers bass and midrange, and a 1 inch beryllium dome handles the treble. The tweeter dome weighs 0.1 g, and its first breakup mode lies above 40 kHz. The enclosure is tuned as a reflex design through a linear port. Davone rates the response at 38 Hz to 30 kHz at -3 dB and the sensitivity at 87 dB for 2.83 V at 1 m, while impedance falls to a minimum of 4.5 ohm. The maker suggests amplifiers of 100 W or more. Each speaker stands 97 cm high, 34 cm wide and 31 cm deep and weighs 21 kg.

Engineering and use context

Davone calls the woofer membrane multimodal, or metamodal. Rather than trying to push all breakup behaviour out of the working band, the Textreme carbon weave spreads its resonant modes so that they occur at low energy and are distributed across the cone. The beryllium tweeter is mounted flush with the front surface, which the maker links to wide and unobstructed off-axis output since there is no step or recess around the dome. The cabinet walls are 25 mm plywood pressed into shape, and the asymmetric internal layout uses angled acoustic reflectors to disperse internal standing waves while keeping the bass output of the port. Low loss bracing stiffens the shell without adding much damping of its own, and a tuned Helmholtz absorber deals with the remaining cabinet energy at a chosen frequency. Because the reflectors are angled rather than set parallel to the outer walls, the two side panels of each cabinet are not mirror images inside, which is why the maker describes the acoustic design as asymmetric. The forming of the plywood into a curved shell also avoids the long flat panels of a rectangular box, which tend to resonate more easily.

Pairing

Its low impedance minimum and moderate sensitivity favour a solid state design that copes with a low load and meets the maker's power guideline, whether a stereo power amplifier with a separate preamplifier or an integrated unit. The curved form and modest footprint suit a living room of around 20 m2 where the speakers need to share space with furniture.

Alternatives

The Davone Reference One is the larger floorstanding model from which the Reference Two was developed.