The DALI OPTICON 8 MK2 Loudspeaker Review

The OPTICON 8 MK2 on review here is one of a series of speakers offered by the Danish speaker maker. The MK2 series consists of smaller bookshelves and floor-standers, a center channel, and on-wall speakers.

At first glance, the speakers are attractive, with the speaker grille on or off. At 79 pounds each, the speakers are solid in build quality. The bass was surprisingly excellent, and the high frequencies helped along by a unique hybrid tweeter design were silky smooth, even when off-axis. All in all, at U.S. $5000 a pair, there was a lot to like.

DALI is a Danish speaker brand founded in 1983 by Peter Lyngdorf, who has been with Snell, NAD, Gryphon Audio, Steinway, and the Lyngdorf brands. The OPTICON line sits in the middle of the company’s product portfolio, under the EPICON and RUBICON offerings and above the SPEKTOR, and OBERON Series.

The OPTICON 8 MK2 is at the top of the OPTICON line of floor-standing speakers, but the company offers speaker families that are more and less expensive than the OPTICON MK2 line. The OPTICON 8 MK2 should be of interest to listeners wanting accurate sound reproduction without climbing to the highest-priced esoteric speakers. Physically, it has 2 woofers, a midrange driver, and a high-frequency module with a soft dome drive unit and a ribbon component.

Let’s start with what we can see. According to DALI, the enclosure is designed to optimize rigidity and minimize panel resonance. The OPTICON MK2 25mm thick front baffles provide massively rigid foundations for the drivers, and the speakers employ extra internal bracing to further ensure rigidity and practically eliminate panel resonance. I can confirm that rapping on the speakers results in no audio resonances.

The magnets, designed by DALI, are also unique, using SMC (Soft Magnetic Compound), a coated magnet granular material that has many advantages when used in driver magnet systems according to DALI. SMC’s unusual combination of very high magnetic permeability and very low electrical conductivity results, says the company, in improved flux linearity, reduced magnetic hysteresis, and a significant reduction in harmonic distortion. All these SMC benefits together are claimed to produce a significant measured and subjective reduction of low-level detail masking and coloration.

Getting to the components, and starting with the bass, this OPTICON 8 is a bass reflex design. Reflex loading employs the otherwise unused acoustic output from the rear of a bass driver to extend low-frequency bandwidth and increase low-frequency power handling. DALI calls this a Dual Flare port design. This Dual Flare technique DALI claims, brings port design into the realm of aerodynamics with exit and entry flares carefully designed to minimize turbulence at the airflow rate expected from the port diameter and tuning frequency. The OPTICON utilizes two 8” woofers. The speakers also utilize a 6 1/2” midrange driver.

The tweeter design is very interesting and unique. DALI calls this a hybrid tweeter, and that describes the configuration exactly. The OPTICON 8 uses a 29mm soft dome tweeter and then couples it with a ribbon tweeter mounted on a new cast aluminum faceplate for reduced vibration.

The hybrid tweeter system is configured so that the ribbon tweeter begins to contribute from 10kHz upwards, just as the response of the soft dome tweeter is beginning slowly to fall away and become more directional. The ribbon tweeter both extends the system frequency response towards 30kHz and contributes to keeping high-frequency horizontal dispersion wider than would otherwise be the case. DALI says the new hybrid tweeter literally offers the best of both worlds – the clarity, speed, and dynamics of a dome tweeter, with the very high-frequency detail and smooth finesse of a ribbon tweeter. These claims were verified as you’ll read in my listening tests.

The speakers also feature optional bi-wiring facilities. The connection terminals on the OPTICON 8 MK2 speakers are gold-plated to ensure long-term reliable connections.

These speakers are beasts. They were delivered in 2 large boxes strapped to a wooden pallet. I needed a friend to unwrap them and remove them from their protective boxes with foam inserts. Then we used a cart to get them from the garage to the living room. At 79 lbs. per speaker, they were awkward to move, and I obviously didn’t want to damage them in any way.

My living room is irregularly shaped, but I replaced my usual speakers with the DALI pair. They were at either end of a low cabinet that houses my components and a 55” flat-screen TV. I was tempted to toe in the speakers aiming them at my listening positions, but DALI advises against that. I’ll discuss this a little later.

The speakers were driven by a 250-watt-per-channel Emotiva power amp.

Some general comments first. These speakers are very clean in my listening environment. When they were first out of the box and wired up, I played a couple of test discs and the bass seemed deep and distortion-free. I had thought I had left my subwoofer hooked up, but in fact, it was turned off, and for detailed listening, it was removed from the room to prevent interaction. I did not want to apply any equalization to the speakers, so Dirac was turned off, and I listened to my processor’s ‘pure stereo’ mode. Surround speakers were also turned off. The idea was to hear pure DALI.

Because of my irregularly shaped room, I toed the speakers in directed toward my listening position, even though DALI suggests the speaker backs stay parallel to the walls.

The reality is, I could hear no difference, meaning the DALI OPTICON 8 MK2 speakers have excellent high-frequency dispersion characteristics. Even sitting directly in front of the left-side tweeters provided me with an excellent image from the right speaker even though I was severely off-axis. That was the best high-frequency dispersion I’ve heard in that room. The high frequencies seemed omnidirectional, so kudos to the Dali engineers.

Here’s some of the music I auditioned along with my comments:

(In some cases, I listened to CDs directly. I also played high-resolution files through my Roon system.)

At $5000.00 these aren’t inexpensive speakers, but they aren’t stratospherically priced either. I was pleased with the sound, and the value of the DALI OPTICON 8 MK2 speakers is unquestionable.

I didn’t know what to expect when these speakers arrived, but I’ve been won over by their sound. Both bass and the high frequencies were standouts with their reach and purity. The precision of the image created in my listening room was stable and realistic.