Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

The Focus 10's class-D modules are manufactured by Pascal, whose "robust and bullet-proof" devices are used in many PA applications; Entwistle calls the company "the biggest manufacturer you've never heard of." When Dynaudio first tried Pascal modules in their flagship Pro range, they didn't like the sound. When the company told Pascal's engineers that their modules sounded like they put a compressor on the amplifier, their engineers fessed up that they included a compressor to prevent blow-ups in PA systems. Blow-ups, however, are not an issue in studio and home situations. It took Pascal's engineers all of five minutes to bypass the compressor and deliver the uncompressed, natural sound that Dynaudio wanted.

Tidal Connect
Entwistle prefers Tidal Connect to other phone/pad streaming options because once the phone gives the speaker instructions, the speaker automatically connects directly to the Tidal server and pulls the music straight from the server without having to go through the phone. This ensures that the signal is not buffered and changed by the phone's audio settings. Only Tidal Connect transcends a smartphone's limitations and avoids extra processing and conversion. Open the Tidal app on your phone, go to HiFi or Master in the top right corner, and turn off loudness normalization and optimized playback (which is an option under "quality") and ignore any 360° reality options. Press "speaker" when you get to the playback screen, then choose the Focus 10 and Tidal Connect.

Setup and review strategy
When Monsieur Quick made a brief visit to Port Townsend, we discovered that by using a 2.5m Nordost Odin 2 digital interconnect—a loaner I had recently received—between the speakers, we could position them farther apart than I typically position my Focus 200 XDs. ("OMG," I exclaimed, "I have a real soundstage!") In their final configuration, the centers of the Focus 10's drivers were 53" apart. The speakers were placed on the same Dynaudio stands I used for the Focus 200 XDs, with the center point 8.5' from my ears.

I downloaded the Dynaudio app to my iPhone 12 Pro, followed the easy setup instructions, then used the phone for playback via Tidal Connect. But once Dynaudio received Roon Ready designation—we stalled the review until that happened—I installed a Roon Nucleus+ music server and used a Ghent Audio Canare umbilical cord between it and an HDPlex 300 linear power supply. Then I connected a Wireworld Platinum Starlight Cat8 Ethernet cable between the Nucleus+ and a Linksys MR8300 v.1.1 mesh router I'd set up as a wireless child node.

Next, I used my phone to operate the Dynaudio control app and Roon. When I wanted to listen wired as much as possible, I connected the child router to the Primary (active) speaker via a second run of Wireworld Platinum Starlight Cat8, and the Primary speaker to the Client speaker via the Nordost Odin 2 digital interconnect. When I wanted to listen in wireless mode, I disconnected the cable between the speakers. Sometimes I also disconnected the Ethernet cable between the router and the Primary speaker. An SSD-equipped Sandisk USB stick inserted into the Nucleus+ provided some files; the rest were streamed from Tidal and Qobuz.

Initially, I set the Dynaudio Control app's Room Optimization settings to neutral. But when bass was less than firm, I adjusted those settings. Since the right/Primary speaker was close to the front wall, I set it to "Wall." The left Client speaker was close to the corner, so I set it to "Corner." Now I heard much tighter bass. I'm told one can tune the speakers even better—possibly much better—using the built-in Dirac room correction, but there wasn't enough time to master and perform Dirac setup. Perhaps I can discuss this in a follow-up review (footnote 4).

As much as I was tempted to listen exclusively via wired mode, because that's always best, most people who buy the Focus models will do so to take advantage of their wireless capability. Hence, I devised every test I could think of to discover what sounded best in what (wireless) configuration.

Let there be music
Moments after I began listening to the Focus 10, I breathed a sigh of relief. The sound was natural, balanced from top to bottom, and invitingly warm. I heard none of the artificial coloration and plasticine smoothness I had found disturbing in Munich (footnote 5). Nor did I hear any of the monotone dryness that characterized much early class-D amplification.

Music flowed beautifully on crack hornist Sarah Willis's recent juicy outing for Alpha, Mozart y Mambo (24/96 WAV download and Qobuz stream), on which she's joined by the Havana Lyceum Orchestra. When I scrolled past Mozart's delightful Horn Concerto No.2 and turned instead to Pepe Gavilondo and Yasel Muñoz's Cuban Dances for Solo Horn, Strings, and Percussion No.1, the rhythms, colors, and melodies of this enterprising marriage of Cuban dance rhythms with classical forms were delightful. This music didn't merely flow; it ran through me and urged me to drop my pen, tap my feet, and dance with the dogs. The only thing that kept me in place was the realization that if I danced, their barking would drown out the music.

As seasoned audiophiles might expect, the quality of reproduction was directly related to the mode of connection. When a digital cable ran between the two speakers and the album was automatically upsampled to 24/192, the track's opening bars had palpable weight. Willis's trumpet was at its most dominant, with more substance than in wireless mode, and the soundstage felt open and deep. Colors, while not as saturated as on my many, many times more expensive reference rig, were nicely differentiated and sufficiently compelling to pull me in.

Percussive attacks were naturally bright, but neither maracas nor stick striking metal sounded brittle. Percussion had real body, and bass descended convincingly low. The natural sense of depth and layering the Focus 10s drew from this recording brought a smile to my face. "This feels pretty damn real," I scribbled in my notes just before a major power outage left us resorting to flashlights and propane. I expect the Focus 10s would sound even better if my internet connection were wired all the way to the modem in the second-floor office, but that is impractical with a setup in the far corner of the first floor living room. Besides, how many people buy a "complete" wireless active speaker system with the intention of wiring it all the way to the modem?

Then I disconnected the digital cable that ran between the speakers, relying instead on a WiSA connection to send signal wirelessly from one speaker to the other. I used the app to switch easily between 24/96 and 24/48 playback. 24/48 playback, on this full-range selection, felt more convincingly spacious, with a better sense of depth. That's right: Serinus, acolyte of hi-rez music, found that the lower sample rate sounded better. This is certainly not the case on my reference dCS gear, but the Dynaudios are a very different animal in a very different setup.

I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that when I went as wireless as possible—no Ethernet cable between the router and Primary speaker and no digital cable between Primary and Client—transparency lessened, colors were less saturated, and instruments were surrounded by less air. As enjoyable as the presentation was, it was a bit less of the full audiophile experience.

These observations were confirmed by the next three selections, Grant Green's "Idle Moments" (24/192 FLAC, Qobuz), Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic's take on the Prologue to Bernstein's music for West Side Story (16/44.1 FLAC, Qobuz), and, to give the Focus 10 a run for its money, the start of Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra's recent rendition of Mahler's Symphony No.5 (both as 24/96 WAV on USB stick and 24/96 FLAC from Qobuz). Yes, these little speakers performed more than credibly on music as complex and powerful as the opening of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. I won't pretend that image size and weight approached that of a huge Mahler orchestra; the image was small but precise. Yet the soundstage was intact and credible, and diverse instrumental lines were presented clearly, without congestion. With big-boned orchestral fare, the Focus 10 had plenty to offer and nothing to apologize for.

Other qualities of these speakers stood out tall. The truncation of reverberation often observed with class-D was nowhere in evidence; the heavily reverbed whistling at the start of West Side Story's Prologue died off as naturally as unnatural reverb can die off, and Bychkov's orchestra glowed convincingly as Mahler's tragic alarms and ominous death march cried out then faded, like a fire's final embers ceasing to glow.

What sounds better, grilles on or off? A brief change of color in the speaker's logo, which is usually white, showed that it knew when the grilles were removed or installed and compensated accordingly. The difference wasn't dramatic, but the sound seemed a bit more direct without grilles.

On the Mahler, could I hear differences between WAV file playback from a solid state USB stick and wireless FLAC streaming from Qobuz (footnote 6)? I could. Colors were richest and the sound most direct from USB; wireless streaming seemed a mite veiled. Musicality, though, rated "10" with both options, and streaming provided far more variety than I could fit onto a 256GB USB stick.

Among the USB stick's contents was last September's release, from Deutsche Grammophon, of cellist Gautier Capuçon, oboist Andreas Ottensamer, and pianist Yuja Wang's recording of music by Rachmaninoff and Brahms. This recording didn't draw me in when I auditioned a bit of it on my reference system, but here, the opening phrases of Brahms's heartfelt Cello Sonata No.1 in E minor, Op.38, had me sighing. The rich glories of Capuçon's close-miked cello were there to savor in all their poetic complexity. The music sounded so gorgeous, expressive, and moving on the Focus 10s that after I completed some more listening tests, I turned off reviewer mode, started from track one, closed my eyes, and reveled in the glories of the entire sonata.

But before I closed down reviewer mode on these speakers for good, another test was in order: With the speakers in wired mode, how did Qobuz's 24/192 stream of the Akademie für alte Musik, Berlin's maximally colorful, spacious, air-filled period instrument recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, compare with the 16/44.1 stream automatically upsampled by the wired speakers to 24/192? I strained to hear any difference. There was more of a difference—small enough that a casual listener might not notice—between the Brandenburgs stored on USB stick and the wireless stream. That's another way of saying that Dynaudio's implementation of automatic upsampling is, to these ears, mighty convincing.

When I played the 24/192 files of the Brandenburgs wirelessly, which means they were automatically resampled to either 24/96 or 24/48 (footnote 7), I found that the extra resolution of 24/96 delivered more color. There also seemed to be more layered complexity to Bach's music when upsampled—which, of course, there is.

I had hoped to compare the sound of Tidal Connect streamed from the Tidal app to the sound of Roon streaming Tidal wirelessly via the Roon app on the same phone. Alas, Port Townsend's multiday power outage produced by 60mph winds that toppled trees onto powerlines and decimated their supporting poles made it impossible to do so before my deadline (footnote 8).

A final observation: As mentioned previously, the Focus 10's images cannot begin to compare in size to those produced by far more expensive and larger loudspeakers driven by big, expensive, high-performance amplifiers. Nor can the Focus 10 produce the detail, complexity, and color of those ultraexpensive, larger monitors. But where the M1s could not convey the low bass pedal on the start of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra without distorting, the smaller, far less expensive Focus 10's DSP ensured that what bass they produced came through all of one piece. They may not deliver much low bass, especially if you crank them up as any Strauss lover would do, but what they do deliver is convincingly intact and distortion-free.

I can hear Kal Rubinson cheering as JVS extols the benefits of DSP, at least in this context.

Sum it up, Serinus!
Designed as a "complete wireless sound system," the Dynaudio Focus 10 active monitors are the most musically satisfying one-stop playback solution I've had the pleasure of hanging with. Thanks to their wireless options, built-in upsampling DAC, multiple streaming options, DSP, and optional Dirac room correction (which I didn't try), all you need supply is a Wi-Fi signal, a streaming subscription, a smartphone or tablet for control, and a little time to fine-tune everything. If you already have Roon, you're ready to go; you can even skip Roon and stick with Tidal Connect. The Focus 10s are easy to set up and optimize, and they deliver all they promise.

If you want to rock out, or if your room is less than intimate in size, the more expensive Focus 30 and Focus 50 models will likely prove more satisfying. But within its limitations of image size and bass quantity, the Focus 10 is one of the most musically satisfying active loudspeakers I've had the pleasure to audition. Highly recommended.

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Footnote 4: John Atkinson is working on a follow-up review, focusing on Dirac correction.

Footnote 5: It was an impressive display, with many speakers in a large room. Impressive, but not ideal for a demo.—Jim Austin

Footnote 6: I do not have a wired connection in the living room. This makes it a good space for evaluating wireless active loudspeakers.

Footnote 7: The choice between 24/48 and 24/96 upsampling is determined by the listener in the Dynaudio app.

Footnote 8: It took 5 days to restore our electricity and 6 to restore our internet. By then, I'd already written and submitted the review using the internet of a neighbor, whose connection survived the windstorm.