Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

With reviews of Wilson's Alexia 2 loudspeaker ($57,900/pair) in the July issue, Constellation's Centaur 500 amplifier ($55,000) in the October issue, and Tidal's Akira loudspeaker ($215,000/pair) in the November issue, my system's been inhaling some rarefied air the past few months. Accordingly, I felt I should live with some components priced within the reach of real-world audiophiles. As it happened, I was finishing up my review of the Constellation amplifier when MoFi Distribution's Lionel Goodfield e-mailed me, asking if I'd like to review the new Diamond 11.2 loudspeaker from the venerable British brand Wharfedale.

Wharfedale? My first pair of "real" loudspeakers, 50 years ago, were Wharfedale Super Lintons, a two-way, stand-mounted design that used the infamous "purple jellyfish" plastic-dome tweeter. In the first blind listening test I took part in, in 1977, for Hi-Fi News magazine, the winner was Wharfedale's high-sensitivity E70. More recently, Herb Reichert reviewed Wharfedale's Diamond 225 loudspeaker in March 2017, with Follow-Ups from Ken Micallef and Art Dudley in June and October 2017. All three writers had been impressed by the Diamond 225, which costs $449/pair and was one of our Joint Budget Products of 2017. It was a no-brainer to ask Goodfield to ship me the new Diamonds, which cost $599/pair.

Double Diamonds
Although Wharfedale is still a British brand, with its R&D department in the UK, it's now owned by a Chinese holding company, the IAG Group, which also owns Audiolab, Castle Acoustics, Luxman, Mission, and Quad. The 11.2 is the largest of three bookshelf speakers in the new range of eight Diamond 11 models, which also includes three floorstanders and two center-channels. The head of the Diamond 11.2's design team, IAG acoustic director Peter Comeau, was also responsible for the great-sounding Quad S-2 ($999/pair), reviewed by Ken Micallef in January 2018.

Like the Diamond 225, the Diamond 11.2 combines a 1" fabric-dome tweeter and a 6.5" mid/woofer with a woven-Kevlar cone in a reflex-loaded, fiber-filled, multilayer MDF cabinet. The new speaker is the same height as the older one, 14", but is 1" wider and 2.5" deeper. More significant, the enclosure's sidewalls are gently curved to the rear, this said to reduce cabinet resonances and internal standing waves. The slot that acts as the reflex port still extends across the full width and depth of the enclosure at its base, but now has semi-parabolic entry and exit curves to linearize airflow.

The tweeter is still mounted at the center of a short, flared waveguide, to control its dispersion, but now has a damped rear chamber, which I assume is what the words "WFR Vented System" on the front plate refer to. Both tweeter and woofer now have a copper-cap pole plate, which is claimed both to reduce inductance and linearize the magnetic flux in the gap. The woofer uses a large-radius, half-roll surround made from a US-sourced "Water-Resistant Polyester Foam" with improved suspension linearity. The woofer's basket has a more rigid and open frame, to reduce the level of early reflections of the cone's rear wave.

Electrical connection is via a single pair of binding posts on the cabinet's rear rather than the Diamond 225's two pairs. Despite the Diamond 11.2's affordable price, with its gloss black front baffle it looks very attractive.

Setup
I mounted the Wharfedales on 24"-tall Celestion stands, isolating the speakers with small pads of Blu-Tack. The stands' central pillars were filled with a mix of dry sand and bird shot, and their bases were spiked to the wooden floor beneath the carpet; this placed the Diamond 11.2s' tweeters exactly 36" above the carpet. I didn't use the magnetically attached black-cloth grilles, as they made the sound a bit too sweet.

I began my auditioning with the Diamond 11.2s placed where I'd set up the Dynaudio Special Forty speakers, which I reviewed in the September issue. Both woofers were 98" from the wall behind the speakers; the right-channel Wharfedale was 52" from the books lining its sidewall, the left-channel speaker 26" from the LPs lining its sidewall. However, the upper bass sounded rather lean, so I moved the Wharfedales closer to the wall behind them: 67" instead of 98". The left speaker was still 26" from its sidewall, but I ended up with the right speaker's woofer 43" from its sidewall. This usefully fattened the low frequencies, but I suspect that both Diamond 11.2s needed to be still closer to the wall behind them than is possible in my room. (Equipment racks and a small raised area at the front right of the room prevent the speakers from being moved closer.)

Listening
I created several of the test signals that are included on Stereophile's three Test CDs and Editor's Choice not only to help optimize setting up a pair of speakers in a room, but also to diagnose how they sound. I began my critical listening to the Wharfedale Diamond 11.2s with the test signals on Editor's Choice (CD, Stereophile STPH016-2). The dual-mono pink-noise track sounded smooth and evenly balanced. However, if I rose from my chair until my ears were above the tweeter axis, the sound took on a slightly hollow coloration. The central image of the noise signal was stable, but not as ideally narrow as I have experienced with, for example, BBC LS3/5a's at one end of the price spectrum, and Tidal Akiras at the other.

The 1/3-octave bass-warble tones from Editor's Choice were reproduced with good weight down to the 80Hz band, with then the 63, 50, and 40Hz bands lower in level than the bands to either side of them. The 32Hz warble tone was exaggerated by the lowest mode in my room, but the 25 and 20Hz bands were inaudible. At my usual listening level of around 80dB (C-weighted, Slow ballistics), I thought I heard some chuffing from the slot with the lowest-frequency bands, but this was actually due to the woofer producing some harmonic content due to the extreme excursions of the unloaded woofer cone.