Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

After the experiments with speaker placement, the Dovedales cleanly reproduced the 1/3-octave warble tones on the Editor's Choice CD down to the 40Hz band. The 32Hz tone was significantly reinforced by the lowest room mode, and while the 25Hz tone was audible I couldn't hear the 20Hz tone. There was no wind noise from the ports with the 20Hz tone, and the warble tones sounded very clean, with no audible "doubling" (adding second-harmonic distortion). The half-step–spaced tonebursts on Editor's Choice spoke cleanly down to 32Hz, with those between 2kHz and 4kHz slightly accentuated. Listening to the enclosure's walls with a stethoscope while the tonebursts played, I could hear some resonant behavior between 200Hz and 300Hz and around 1kHz, but the cabinet seemed well-damped overall.

As I usually use minimonitors, from KEF and GoldenEar, I almost never listen to organ recordings. Even with the equalization I use with Roon or Dirac Live to extend the low frequencies, it is all too easy to overload the small woofers. With the Dovedale's 10" woofer, I had no such qualms. I played Jonas Nordwall's performance of the Toccata from Widor's Organ Symphony No.5 (24/88.2 AIFF file), which I had recorded in a church in Portland, Oregon, in 2014 (footnote 2). This track has a lot of high-level content below 40Hz. The Dovedales had no problems playing it at high levels without strain, with a peak C-weighted SPL of 101dB at the work's climax. (At this listening level, the MBL's volume control was set just 3dB below the maximum level possible with the Parasound amplifiers!)

I followed the Widor with Vaughan-Williams's arrangement of the Welsh folk tune "Rhosymedre," played by Philip Ledger on Organ Music from King's (24/192 needle drop from LP, EMI HQS-1356). This is a much gentler, more contemplative work than the Widor. The organ's bass pedals evenly underpinned the music, which was set back in the King's College Chapel's supportive acoustic, captured naturally by engineer Bob Gooch. However, the LP's surface noise was more apparent than I remembered.

Loudspeakers that offer extended, powerful-sounding bass often sacrifice low-frequency clarity. But Ray Brown's double bass on "Limehouse Blues," from André Previn's jazz trio album After Hours (16/44.1 FLAC, Telarc/Qobuz), and Jerome Harris soloing on a Taylor acoustic bass guitar on "Sway Low," from Rendezvous (16/44.1 ALAC file, STPH013-2; footnote 3), were reproduced by the Dovedales with excellent upper-bass articulation. I didn't feel any need to block any of the Dovedale's ports.

The Dovedale's midrange did justice to recorded voices. Minnesota's male-voice choral group Cantus sounded natural and uncolored singing Eric Whitacre's "Lux Aurumque" on my recording of While You Are Alive (24/88.2 ALAC, Cantus Recordings 1208), though the soundstage was less deep than I intended when I mixed the track. Triggered by the news of Melanie's passing at the end of January, I streamed her 1970 recording of "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" from Qobuz (16/44.1 FLAC, Buddah Records). The Wharfedales did well with Melanie's voice in the verses, but the Edwin Hawkins Singers in the chorus took on some mid-treble emphasis that had me reaching for Roon's volume control. By contrast, while there was some slight sibilance emphasis on Suzanne Vega's unaccompanied "Tom's Diner" (24/96 FLAC, from Solitude Standing, A&M/Qobuz), the singer's midrange sounded clean, as it did on Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car (LP Version)" (16/44.1 FLAC, Qobuz/Elektra).

Piano recordings are very revealing of midrange colorations. Thomas Conrad favorably reviewed Adam Birnbaum's Preludes (16/44.1 FLAC, Chelsea Music Festival/Qobuz) in the January 2024 issue. Birnbaum's solo at the beginning of the Prelude in E Minor revealed some liveliness in the upper mids, but not sufficient to interfere with the music. And when bassist Matt Clohesy started playing, his instrument was reproduced powerfully but with good clarity.

Adam Birnbaum was the soloist on Sasha Matson's Concerto for Piano & Jazz Orchestra (from Molto Molto, 24/96 WAV files, Stereophile STPH023), which I produced. The Dovedale's highs on this album didn't sound exaggerated, and the soundstage was accurately presented, with the images of the individual instruments unambiguously positioned between and behind the plane of the speakers. I was intrigued by how such large speakers could completely disappear, leaving a wide, deep soundstage, but disappear they did.

I finished my critical auditioning of the Wharfedale Dovedales with Jerome Sabbagh's Vintage (24/192 FLAC, Sunnyside/Qobuz), which was Stereophile's February 2024 Recording of the Month. Like Molto Molto, this album was engineered by Ryan Streber at New York's Oktaven Studio. Again, the speakers disappeared, leaving Sabbagh's tenor saxophone hanging in space close to the left-hand Dovedale and Joe Martin's powerful-sounding double bass centered in the middle of the image of Kenny Barron's piano. Johnathan Blake's drums stably stretched from far left to far right on the stage and were set a little way behind the images of the other three instruments. His cymbals sounded natural, without any exaggeration of their high-frequency "swish."

Conclusion
I wasn't sure what to expect from the Wharfedale Dovedale. With its wide baffle and its resemblance to the old-fashioned "big-box" speakers from the 1960s, I was anticipating an old-fashioned sound. That's not what I got—at all. While the Dovedale's mid-treble could sound a little too forward with some recordings, this for me was outweighed by the speaker's powerful, extended low frequencies, natural-sounding midrange, and generally clean high frequencies. Recommended.

---

Footnote 2: Readers are welcome to download this recording from dropbox.com/s/wjjuj9keg0kvkow/Widor_mixdown.aif?dl=0

Footnote 3: This CD is out-of-print but the files can be downloaded or streamed from jeromeharris.bandcamp.com/album/rendezvous.