Dynaudio doesn’t much care for ‘demo music’. You know the kind. It’s polished. Smooth. Produced. It’s made to sound perfect in perfect rooms, with perfect furniture and perfect speaker positioning, and no ambient noise, or kids, or life. And no one really listens to it. It’s dull.
Which is why, to bring its range of active speakers to What Hi-Fi? readers, Dynaudio rented a real, open-plan house. It had windows and wood floors and angles and stairs and cats. The playlist was readers’ own – real – music, pumped out by Dynaudio’s Focus XD products (the 600, 400 and 200 models) and its Xeo range (the 6 and the 4, along with the fresh-from-the-factory Xeo 2).
The result? A bit of a party. There were set demos, of course (Madness by Muse was a particular crowd-pleaser), but the chance for readers to play their own music – music they know inside out – was seized with gusto.
“The real test is for me to play one of my own tracks. I could definitely see a significant difference – these speakers are really something special,” said one attendee. “I was totally blown away by the sound – it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” said another. “It brought me back to listening to live music, and thinking back to when I first went to gigs.”
And that’s the acid test. Real people, real music, and a real-world listening situation. Wireless high-definition audio is clearly here to stay.
Meet the Xeo 2
The brand-new Xeo 2 is the smallest member of the Xeo family. These compact standmounters retain all the active internals of their big brothers – as well as that trademark clout – at a fraction of the size. Downward-firing ports mean they can be wall-mounted for a tidy set-up, while 24-bit/192kHz file support, Bluetooth and regular wired inputs cover all your source bases.
For more information on the Dynaudio Xeo 2, click here >>>