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Pride and prejudice

Never judge a speaker without listening to it
by Michael Jones

January 2002

Prejudice is such an ugly word. Yet I was guilty of prejudice when it came to this speaker.

You see, I had it in mind that the DB Dynamics speaker being delivered to me was a Cerwin-Vega wannabe - very loud, lots of bass, not much subtlety.

DB who?

You may not have heard of DB Dynamics before. They're an Australian company formed a few years back by the (now former) Wharfedale distributor. The said distributor wanted a "high value" speaker - one that offered a lot for a low price.

The recently released Series 2 Polaris range - of which this speaker, the romantically named AC688F is the most expensive model - consists of two floorstanders, a couple of bookshelfs, a centre speaker and three (count 'em) subwoofers.

This is a big speaker. The Polaris stands some 1090mm high - that's around 300mm (or one foot for the unmetricated) higher than many other floorstanding speakers. This great height is to place the tweeter at normal listening level.

The depth is a still large 378mm, while the 226mm width is determined mainly by the size of the woofers.

Speaking of which (excuse the pun) the Polaris consists of two 200mm woofers with a tweeter right in-between. Although this is sometimes known as a D'Appolito configuration, strictly speaking this also requires a specific crossover configuration.

Finished entirely in black with a black grille, the potentially monolithic appearance of the Polaris is ameliorated somewhat by the front baffle. A separate piece of mdf, the baffle is machined to get away from the black slab look.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

I mentioned before that my expectations were for a brash "rock" speaker - an upfront sound with plenty of kick from an ill-defined but loud bass. Boy, was I wrong!

Instead I heard a speaker without brashness or harshness. The Polaris had a warm tonal balance, with a slight weighting towards the lower midrange and bass in my room. It was very smooth and inviting to listen to.

Rock heads need not despair - the Polaris could go loud and pump out the bass where needed. I clocked Moby's Play CD at some 110dB - that's loud enough to rattle the neighbour's kids out of their bunks!

Pink Floyd's The Wall just purred through the Polaris, with the scale and breadth to the sound. The opening of Hey You features a powerful and well defined fretless bass guitar. A lot of cheap and big speakers blur the sound, but with the Polaris it was very easy to hear that it was a fretless bass, and that the rest of the track featured a fretted bass guitar.

The Wall is also a disc to show off stereo imaging. The Polaris is a real champ with imaging, something I wasn't expecting. Lateral (left/right) imaging was superb, but depth did suffer.

The good sounds from the Polaris are heard when you're seated. Stand up or move around and the sound thickens and loses much of its focus and clarity. This is because of uneven dispersion.

What really surprised me was the Polaris' superb performance on classical music. Here is the answer to an impoverished classical music fan - an affordable speaker that offers good sound and a wide bandwidth.

Even a large scale work such as Mahler's Second Symphony (Rattle/Birmingham Symphony on EMI) couldn't phase the Polaris. The wide ranging dynamics of this piece were handled effortlessly, while the slightly warm tonality of the speakers coupled with the excellent extension and power in the bass showed that the Polaris works well with large scale classical music.

Solo piano was very well rendered, with excellent resolution, body, weight and clarity.

In my room the Polaris produced solid bass down to a low 35Hz, which is an excellent performance. The lower midrange on down was elevated by a few dB, explaining the warm tonality.

There's no doubt in my mind that the Polaris AC688F is quite a find. It offers a sound with a very wide bandwidth, huge dynamics and plenty of subtlety. Warmly recommended.

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