Volume in space: DALI

Whether you’re lolling on a sofa in a roomy hotel lobby or perusing the clothing rails of a spacious boutique, the quality and clarity of music surrounding you makes as crucial a contribution to a venue’s ambience as its inviting interior and moody lighting. For designers and architects of any large venue – others might include a members’ club or conference hall – finding an acoustically effective solution to incorporate sound into their elegant designs is paramount. It’s also desirable to provide crisp, crystalline sound quality that reproduces the experience of attending a live concert, eliminating the artificiality of hearing a recorded performance.

One of the leading hi-fi brands, Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries (DALI), has fine-tuned the art of bringing clear sound into large spaces and distributing it evenly, to the delight of architects and designers worldwide. Established in 1983, the company has spent the intervening decades rigorously refining hi-fi sound thanks to its hallmark wall- or ceiling-mounted Custom Installation (CI) speakers. Their global success rests partly on their wide-dispersion design, among other technological factors developed and combined to allow the recorded music to replicate original performances as faithfully as possible.

When it comes to a stereo set-up, the convention among hi-fi enthusiasts is to ‘toe in’ speakers so that they point inwards towards a small, but optimal, listening sweet spot. A downside to this is that the resulting narrow beam restricts the area in which sound spreads. By contrast, the faithfully reproduced sound fanning out generously from DALI’s wide-dispersion speakers inevitably enlarges the area where sound – including the sweet spot (the area where the best sound is heard between the two speakers) – is clearly and evenly heard, and pervades the entire space.

Moreover, the sweet spot between two widely audible stereo speakers can be appreciated not just in the area immediately between the speakers, but in a large part of the room. If a concert is being heard, it’s possible, with the aid of DALI speakers, to tell exactly where musicians were on stage while their performance was being recorded. Visitors and guests in a large public space boasting DALI speakers don’t need to be rooted to one spot. Wherever they happen to be sitting or walking around, the quality of sound heard is optimised and consistently high. What’s more, there is no need to increase the volume to allow the sound to be heard in another part of the room, which also reduces distortion.

A key benefit of DALI’s wide-dispersion speakers is that fewer speakers are needed in big spaces, providing architects and interior designers with a more economical option, while simultaneously enhancing the sound for users. For much larger spaces, however, more speakers are needed to distribute sound evenly.

The speakers' unobtrusiveness also offers aesthetic appeal, discreetly fixed to walls at right-angles or ceiling-mounted. Consequently, the physical source of the sound – the speakers – is almost invisible, an advantage in itself, resulting in an effect that is at once ethereal, ambient and pleasingly immersive without being diffuse or imprecise. Helping to make the speakers less conspicuous still is their super-fine, magnetic front grilles, which can be painted to match any room’s scheme.

Music fans on the one hand and designers on the other might not, on the face of it, have much in common. But both are bound to appreciate DALI’s speakers either for their visual elegance or aural precision – or both.

© Architonic