With The Wall concept, true to its long-standing reputation, Davis Acoustics presents more than just a speaker with exceptional performance. Here, the French designer and producer of equipment for the most demanding music lovers is offering a new vision of sound reproduction. The architecture of Davis The Wall aims to reconcile very high fidelity with life in a (vast) domestic interior. It’s a concept born of the realisation that, in the vast majority of cases, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile high quality speakers with satisfactory characteristics and classic or modern interior architecture.
With The Wall, which also aims to relaunch Davis Acoustics’ Heritage range, it is truly possible to talk about “acoustic furniture”. The loudspeaker becomes an interior design element in its own right, in the same way as a bookshelf or a display case, while fully fulfilling its vocation as a tool for faithful, realistic and moving sound reproduction.
What’s more, the decorative role that Davis Acoustics has given its new loudspeakers frees them from the usual constraints associated with their positioning within the listening space. There’s no longer any question of hiding them away or relegating them to the corner of a room where they would be hard pressed to express themselves fully. With their elegant, slender monolithic appearance, they naturally find their place and become a piece of furniture that asserts the personality of the listening room, in keeping with its dual role as auditorium and living room…
Impressive seating
However, for Davis Acoustics, true to its vocation of striving for perfection in sound reproduction, it was essential to offer these loudspeakers a listening quality to match their looks. To achieve this, Davis Acoustics opted for a three-way architecture featuring four exceptional drivers. For full-bodied bass with incredible depth, The Wall speakers make use of two very long-travel woofers assembled in a push-pull load.
The two 21cm-diameter woofers with carbon diaphragms face each other: one in a closed cabinet, the other in a cabinet opened by a decompression port whose internal mouth is cut at 45°. This push-pull load naturally (mechanically) filters the whole assembly in bandpass (30 Hz to 100 Hz); all that needs to be added is a 6 dB filter at 100 Hz to ensure cut-off. Management of the midrange is entrusted to a front-mounted loudspeaker housed in the upper part of the cabinet. It works almost in full-range mode.
Note that its motor uses a TiCoNAl magnet. This material provides an intense, linear field in the motor’s air gap, in which the voice coil moves. The voice coil is therefore bathed in an intense and constant magnetic field, whatever the amplitude of its movements. This guarantees a particularly low level of distortion. It has a copper ring to linearise impedance. Its membrane is made of Kevlar. It is housed in a bass-reflex cabinet with rear port.
Realistic transparency and smoothness
A cone tweeter fitted with a glass fibre/aramid cone extends the frequency response of this midrange driver into the high frequencies. The use of a conical diaphragm rather than a traditional dome on the tweeter is one of the special features of these speakers. These technological choices guarantee remarkably balanced sound reproduction and deliver a high frequency that is very present without becoming aggressive or excessively bright.
What’s more, the midrange driver and tweeter are housed very close together. This assembly gives the midrange/treble section an operation close to that of a point source. This ensures that the sound image delivered by these loudspeakers is full-bodied and very well defined, and that each element of the soundscape is precisely located in space.
A symbiosis with the home
To make them even easier to install, these speakers are perfectly symmetrical in appearance. This means they can be assigned to either the left or right channel of the stereo system. This malleability allows you to play with the aesthetics of the installation, thanks to the black front panel with its angled cut-out.
Finally, for an impeccably elegant finish, these speakers come with a walnut-coloured genuine natural wood veneer. A choice of finish that makes each The Wall system unique. This ‘wall of sound’, as impressive for its unusual dimensions as it is seductive for its elegance, deserves to be paired with the very best electronics. It also comes with two generously-sized WBT terminals capable of accepting large cross-section cables as well as banana plugs and forks.
The set up
The Walls are wide and tall, but fairly shallow. This means they can easily be installed in a large room, as they need space, but especially if you avoid corners. On the other hand, relative proximity to the rear wall is not a problem.
With their favourable efficiency, these speakers are fairly flexible when it comes to choosing amplification. But if we can give you one piece of advice, it’s to choose a sufficiently powerful amp, because The Wall speakers express themselves loudly and convincingly, requiring commitment and energy from the electronics.
Each loudspeaker will be packed with castors, which will make it easy to remove from its box. A wooden board will be placed next to the wheels to prevent damage to the box. A spanner will also be provided for easy removal of the castors from the speaker. Finally, Teflon glides will already be screwed to the underside of the speaker. Customers wishing to use spikes will be able to use the screw thread on the wheels, but spikes will not be supplied… We were able to listen to these speakers in various environments, including at Hi-Fi 35 in Rennes, for which we would like to thank them.
The sound the Davis The Wall
High-fidelity is not immune to a certain conformism, and loudspeakers in particular. For several years now, the fashion has been for slim columns equipped with numerous small transducers. But some manufacturers don’t hesitate to break away from this trend, as shown by Davis Acoustics and its astonishing The Wall.
You could almost say that the Trojan manufacturer has taken the exact opposite approach to all the others. Its new speakers are shallow, very wide, very high, finished in traditional wood and mounted on practical (but very anti-audiophile) castors. Don’t worry, you can put spikes or cones on them. Like some of you, we looked at this anachronistic object with amazement, but that, of course, was before we listened to them. And if we had to pick out just one aspect of their sonic performance, it would be the immense amount of pleasure they gave us.
At the risk of being a little trivial, we’d say that The Wall manage to recreate an extraordinary wall of sound. The music is everywhere in the room, in a highly structured way. The sound is big, sometimes immense, coming at you according to the circumstances and specificities of each recording. It manages to remain almost intimate on a Monteverdi madrigal, or quite simply Dantesque on a piece of jazz like the exceptional Voix croisées by Didier Levallet’s quintet.
With The Wall, you’re clearly more in touch with the musical performance than the sound contingencies. It’s a complete departure from analysis and a move towards music-lovers’ considerations. The most impressive element of their performance is the way they manage to put the different components of the piece into perspective, to inhabit the sound space. They reproduce an entirely unusual level of relief.
The second instantly recognisable virtue is their masterful management of dynamics. They are capable of astonishing acceleration, without the slightest trace of compression. As a result, the sound always seems surprisingly smooth and fluid. If anything goes wrong while you’re listening to them, don’t blame them, but ask yourself some serious questions about the environment (marriage, cabling, installation…).
These are free and liberated loudspeakers. In no way do they restrict reproduction; on the contrary, they seem to relieve it. The message is delivered in a very natural way. Nothing stands in its way. With The Wall, the sound is alive, embodied, materialised at a quite different level. It’s less evanescent, more ‘full’. It’s an approach that won’t appeal to everyone. Some will call it vintage. We wouldn’t know how to describe it, except perhaps as jubilant or enjoyable. In any case, if you like thrills, you’re in for a treat.
Our conclusion
We fell in love with these speakers. They took us on a journey. To get away from our everyday lives, however excellent they may be. They are clearly on the fringes of high-end speaker production at this price level. And that’s precisely what sets them apart and makes them unique. Not only do they look different, but their sound reproduction is even more so!
Don’t stop at this first impression, go and listen to them, because you’re likely to be very surprised by their remarkable ability to transport you to the recording location. Not only do we endorse this concept, but we have to congratulate Davis Acoustics for daring to embark on such a disruptive venture. Sometimes dreams are made to come true.
Authors: Estève Fabry and Laurent Thorin
Technical sheet: Davis The Wall
- Origin: France
- Price :
- 22 000 € (walnut)
- 25,000 (Luxury finish)
- Dimensions : 700 x 1300 x 300 mm
- Weight : 100 kg
- Max. power rating : 120 W
- Bandwidth : 30 to 20,000 Hz
- Efficiency: 91.5 dB
