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Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker Page 4

Accuracy
It's snowing outside. Since I live in Colorado, this is not an unusual spring occurrence. A snow day. Perfect weather for kicking back and listening to music. But the Dunlavy Signature VI was not designed for such slothful pursuits as just kicking back and casually listening. This baby is a tool, not a toy. Accuracy and fidelity are its principal attributes.

Pardon me if I harp on this concept of an "accurate" loudspeaker. I believe the ultimate goal of true high-end design must be toward accuracy. Just sounding good—even wondrous, magical, musical, impressive, entrancing,…

Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker Page 5

While many audiophile speakers are purposely designed so the front edge of their soundstage begins well behind the speakers, the Signature VIs are not. Even with tube amps, the front of the Dunlavy soundstage started at the speakers' grilles and went back from there. Since the Dunlavys needed to be set up a good deal farther apart than most speakers, very little musical material seemed to be coming from beyond the outer boundaries of the speakers. A shortcoming? I don't think so. It just demonstrates that I have a fairly dead room without spurious side reflections, and the Signature VIs…

Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker Page 6

Accuracy redux
In his March 1996 review of the Jadis Eurythmie II horn speakers (Vol.19 No.3, p.109), Jonathan Scull devoted a great deal of space to the speaker's emotional appeal. Since I believe the music, rather than the equipment, should supply a listener's emotional jollies, I intentionally haven't gone on at length about the sound of my favorite music through the big Dunlavys. Also, the Dunlavy aesthetic is a rather left-brained affair, and such purple prose would be rather out of place.

The Signature VI is not intended to make recorded music sound any better or more musical…

Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker Specifications

Sidebar 1: Specifications

Full-range, floorstanding loudspeaker. Drive-units: two 15" long-throw paper-cone woofers, two 8" long-throw paper-cone woofers, two 5.5" plastic-cone midrange units, and one 1" silk-dome tweeter. Frequency response: 25Hz-20kHz, ±0.5dB (approx. -3dB at 20Hz). Acoustic phase response: less than +1 degrees, -2 degrees, 100Hz-10kHz. Sensitivity: 91dB/W/m (2.83V RMS). Nominal impedance: 5 ohms. Minimum impedance: 3 ohms. Maximum impedance: 7.5 ohms (including bass resonance). Radiation pattern: symmetrical in both vertical and horizontal planes. Low-frequency…

Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker System

Sidebar 2: System

The following equipment was used for this speaker review:

Analog sources were an upgraded VPI TNT Jr. turntable with outboard flywheel, sitting on a Bright Star base and a Townshend Seismic Sink. Tonearms mounted on the table were the Graham 1.5TC and Clearaudio/Souther TQ-1. Cartridges included the van den Hul MC-1 Super, Dynavector XX-II, AudioQuest MC-200, Fidelity Research/van den Hul FR-1, Denon DL103/vdH, and a Denon DL-SI. Digital front-ends were PS Audio Lambda CD Drive and C.E.C. TL 2 CD transports, and a Sony D-7 portable DAT recorder connected via…

Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker JA Listens to the Dunlavy SC-VI

Sidebar 3: JA Listens to the Dunlavy SC-VI

In my own auditioning of the big Dunlavy, performed with an Adcom 5800 amplifier in Dunlavy's own listening room when I drove up to Colorado Springs to measure the speaker, there was one aspect of its sound that struck me as almost unique. I used the opportunity to audition the test pressing of the Robert Silverman Liszt Sonata CD that we released in June (Sonata, STPH008-2). While visually the SC-VI is an enormous loudspeaker, I agree with SS that, if you shut your eyes, it doesn't sound "big." By this I mean that its imaging was so precisely…

Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker Measurements

Sidebar 4: Measurements

As with some other monster speakers—the JMlab Grande Utopia in May '96, for example, and the Jadis Eurythmie II in March—the SC-VI's size and weight precluded measuring it in Stereophile's listening room, where I routinely perform speaker measurements. (Generally speaking, to perform an acoustic measurement in a room requires the room to be very much larger than the loudspeaker.) But in the case of the big Dunlavy, the fact that the company is based in Colorado Springs—a mere six-hour hop by car over the Raton Pass from Stereophile World HQ in Santa Fe, New Mexico…

Dunlavy Audio Labs Signature SC-VI loudspeaker Measurements part 2

The bulk of the loudspeaker, coupled with the lack of any turntable facilities in the DAL anechoic chamber, made it impossible to examine the SC-VI's off-axis behavior. However, during my own auditioning, I did the usual stand-up/sit-down test as well as listening critically at various off-axis angles. The speaker's dispersion does appear to be well-behaved.

In the time domain, the Dunlavy's impulse response can be seen in fig.3. It has an excellent, time-coherent shape, though with some slight HF ringing evident. A reflection can also be seen about 2.5ms after the main pulse, which…

Dynaco Stereo 70 II power amplifier

I dig tube amps. When all's said and done, good tube amps seem to sound more like real life than most solid-state gear; even after listening to and enjoying the hell out of musical solid-state designs like the Audio Research D-240 II and the Muse Model One Hundred, once I hook up the big VTL Deluxe 225s again it's just like going home. I could go on about timbral accuracy and clearer midrange textures, but the bottom line is, music just plain sounds better when you shoot it through good tubes, and once most people experience that magic, they're hooked.

Only problem is, that ol' valve…

Dynaco Stereo 70 II power amplifier Page 2

Aside from the changes detailed above, the new Panor/Dynaco amp is clearly a Stereo 70 clone; the two pairs of EL34 output tubes driven in Ultralinear mode, centrally mounted power transformer flanked by the two smaller output transformers, and front-mounted input RCA jacks all duplicate the classic Dyna look. Located on the rear of the 70 II are four single 5-way binding posts per channel for ground, plus 4-, 8-, and 16-ohm output transformer taps. Potential modifiers take note: while the original Dyna's entire audio circuit was exposed on the top of the chassis for easy access, the Panor…