Lars Worre Of DALI Speakers Reflects On Four Decades Of Innovation
Danish speaker manufacturer DALI is celebrating 40 years of speaker innovation, quite an achievement … [+]
This year’s Munich High-End Hi-Fi show saw the launch of the Epikore 11 speaker and IO-12 headphones from speaker brand DALI. Both products incorporate DALI’s patented SMC (Soft Magnetic Compound) technology which the company claims produces some of the best wired and wireless listening. It’s been quite a year for the Danish speaker manufacturer because 2023 also marks its 40th anniversary.
Denmark punches well above its weight with audio innovation. This Nordic country of five million people is home to Bang & Olufsen, several leading speaker driver manufacturers and a world-class hearing-aid sector that excels in the miniaturization of electronics. The country has always had a passion for audio. It was a Danish engineer, Peter L. Jensen, created the dynamic loudspeaker concept in 1915, soon after the birth of recorded sound.
Driven by years of musical passion and the need to create high-quality and affordable hi-if speakers, Nordic audio retailer Hi-Fi Klubben began making speakers in the cellar of the company’s founder, Peter Lyngdorf, in 1983.
In 1986, company founder Peter Lyngdorf breaks the ground at Nørager, Denmark, for the construction … [+]
Three years after Lyngdorf began making speakers in his cellar, the DALI brand was established, and the DALI 2 speaker model became Denmark’s most popular entry-level loudspeaker. The success of the DALI 2 was down to its sonic performance, compact size and, most importantly, its affordable price, which undercut rivals by a massive 50%.
By 1986, the DALI brand had become so successful the company was able to commission a dedicated speaker factory at the brand’s present location of Nørager, Denmark. In just three years, the company had gone from a home-spun brand manufactured in its founder’s cellar to a global audio brand with DALI speakers sold in 65 countries.
DALI’s purpose-built factory was initially shared with Cerwin-Vega, an American loudspeaker company that decided to manufacture European products. DALI was charged with making the Cerwin-Vega product line for all of Europe. The production of Cerwin-Vega speakers certainly played an essential role in the initial growth of DALI.
Since the formation of the brand, DALI has gone on to win many awards over the past four decades. DALI has won an impressive 22 What Hi-Fi Awards in the last decade alone; that’s a remarkable achievement in an incredibly competitive market encompassing wireless speakers, soundbars, standmount and floor-standing speakers, and even 5.1 surround sound packages.
DALI has collected some 22 awards from the UK’s prestigious What Hi Fi magazine. .
Steven Weiner, senior vice president at legendary US audio reseller ListenUp, is just one of the distributors in DALI’s global network. Weiner says: “I’ve been fortunate to be aware of Dali since they set up a US office in Denver early in their efforts to establish a presence in the US. ListenUp’s long-standing relationship with Dali and the awareness of the innovations Peter Lyngdorf has brought to advance quality audio is legendary.”
Praise for DALI is widespread around the audio industry and it doesn’t get much more glowing than endorsements like Weiner’s. These days, Peter Lyngdorf is no longer involved in the company’s day-to-day running, but 40 years on, he remains chairman of the board and is still a majority shareholder.
Meanwhile, the audio press continues to sing the praises of this Danish speaker specialist. Becky Scarrott is the audio editor at Tech Radar and was formerly with the revered British What Hi Fi magazine: “My dearest Dali memory involves the team’s love of music. I was at the international hi-fi trade show, High-End Munich 2023, and having spent several hours listening to classical concertos and huge orchestral pieces on various expensive speakers to remark on the dispersion and stereo imaging, I decided to ask Dali if they could just open the things out and give me some Snoop Dogg. This was a 40th-anniversary party, after all.
Scarrott added: “Suffice it to say, the Dali Epikore 11 speakers gave me the chance. These speakers were agile but punchy; zealous but accurate, giving me the textures in Snoop’s lyrics while going all the way down to celebrate those early noughties juicy hip-hop registers. I left knowing that hi-fi was still for me. And the folk at Dali understood that I just needed music.”
I spoke with Lars Worre of DALI to find out more about the astonishing growth of an audio … [+]
After hearing that glowing feedback, I decided to dig deeper into the decisions that propelled the DALI to such heights in just 40 years. I spoke with Lars Worre, the company’s CEO, to learn more about the astonishing growth of an audio brand based in one of the EU’s smaller states.
Mark Sparrow: DALI has had a lot of history and milestones in its 40 years, but for anyone who doesn’t know the brand, how would you describe the DALI way of doing business?
Lars Worre: DALI is a Danish specialist manufacturer of high-quality speakers. Elaborating a bit, we build products that must, in any category, exceed the listener’s expectations. We achieve and raise these expectations through long-lasting ownership in the consumer’s home by gradually revealing new and unexplored sides of their favorite music. In the best case, we try to uncover hidden sound ‘easter eggs’ in recordings. Something which can be present more often than people realize… until they hear it.”
Sparrow: Denmark is an audio manufacturing hotspot. How does such a relatively small country produce such an impressive selection of brands, innovation and talent?
Worre: Much historical writing is post-rational, making a virtue out of necessity. Like the definition of a tradition, it may have been going on for so long that nobody can quite remember why it began. For Denmark and audio, the case is different. We have a historical foundation in the origins of loudspeaker development.
Electromagnetism, the basis for all the speaker transducers we use, was first discovered by the Danish physicist H.C. Oersted. Standing on his shoulders is the storage of speech and music on a magnetic medium, which was first made available by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen in his wire recorder, commonly known as The Telegraphone.
Finally, the invention of the electrodynamic driver – as we still know it – was initially patented by Danish engineer Peter L Jensen. The US sometimes likes to take credit for this, but sorry, America, Jensen was a Dane. On top of the historical anchors, we Danes always had the cold, dark winters in the North. This enabled us to have the time to invent. We are interested in music and those long winter evenings allowed people to experiment with sound, electronics and loudspeakers.
The KORE loudspeaker is DALI’s flagship model and is exported worldwide.
Sparrow: Many audio companies were formed in the 1970s and early 1980s. What impulses lead to the formation of DALI?
Worre: DALI grew out of a Danish hi-fi retail chain called Hi-Fi Klubben which means The Hi-Fi Club, which was well-established in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In 1983 we came into being as a private-label development and manufacturing brand. We offered excellent build quality and premium sound at a sensible price from day one. It took us another decade to ramp up export sales; the rest is history. DALI is present in more than 70 countries around the world.
Sparrow: DALI has just launched its flagship KORE speaker, which follows the original high-end DALI 40 speakers. What was the story behind the creation of both models?
Worre: The DALI 40 was quite something when it launched. It was a speaker with good drivers and a well-built cabinet with ultra-low resonance. The DALI 40 also had a patented bass system with a quartet of eight-inch drivers (two of which were inside the cabinet) forming an L- coupling system that canceled out all the resulting reaction forces and vibrations, enabling the speaker to go deeper into the bass frequencies compared to almost any other competitor. Those features made the DALI 40 famous at the time. The only drawback was it required an amplifier with matching impedance and sensitivity.
DALI speakers are also used in custom installs for extensive home cinema setups.
I should also mention the DALI MEGALINE as one of our later premium speakers. The MEGALINE was more extensive and expensive than the DALI 40 and still stands as a physical landmark. In the mid-to-late 1990s, it was presented as a prototype with a full-range hybrid line source and stood 2.33 meters tall. There was so much demand for the MEGALINE it went into production and sold for more than eight years without any changes. It received more accolades worldwide than any other product we had made before.
The DALI KORE is our latest flagship model. On the one side, it combines the best features of the MEGALINE plus all our achievements in driver design since then. That includes the most ambitious SMC implementation ever seen. SMC is DALI’s patented Soft Magnetic Compound and is used in the pole piece of the woofer magnet motor system. All the latest DALI loudspeakers benefit from SMC. The result is agile and well-behaved woofers with ultra-low loss and a significant reduction in distortion.
The KORE has low dynamic compression and distortion, even at the lowest frequencies, continuing the pursuit of perfection through evolution. It sets new goals for a superior sound which we consider a pinnacle in quality. In short, KORE is the best speaker DALI has ever made, yet it builds on decades of innovation and technical development.
The MEGALINE is a physical landmark for DALI. In the mid-to-late 1990s. Originally, it was presented … [+]
Sparrow: The name DALI stands for Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries. You clearly consider yourselves audiophiles, so what is your favorite type of music or recording artist? Who do you come back to again and again when testing speakers?
Worre: We consider the term “audiophile” a reflection of a desire and conscious striving to get the best representation – including the best version – of any existing music type, genre or recording rather than pointing to any specific artistic or musical direction.
The audiophile loves music or movie sound and gets great joy and satisfaction from obtaining this incredible “connection” to significant moments in music history with the best artists and musicians when listening through carefully selected and set-up sound systems to the best recordings. It’s a journey where the listener becomes an integral part of the process. Being an audiophile is also about the chase, just like you can become a part of the process when you decide to brew the best possible cup of coffee by carefully selecting the best equipment, the best-roasted beans, water, brewing parameters, etc.
I occasionally get a crush on various albums and artists. Currently, my turntable mainly spins vinyl from the fabulous Astor Piazzolla. I’m also re-discovering the entire back catalog of the American-born jazz pianist Kenny Drew and his unique “Danification” of jazz. But I also find increasing pleasure in the more modal jazz styles like Miles Davis. In my case, this includes various cover versions of Davis’s many epic tunes and playing styles. When winter comes around, I’ll be moving to more classical styles like JS Bach’s interpretations on the piano.
Astor Piazzolla performs live on stage at The North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Holland on July … [+]
Sparrow: DALI owns a record label, which is quite unusual for an audio company, although Linn and Naim also release their own recordings. Why did DALI enter the music recording business?
Worre: We were always aware that navigating the world of music recordings is like navigating a jungle without a compass. We wanted to inspire potential customers with great recordings, including hi-fi compilations. The compilations proved very popular as they all became collector’s items.
Over the years, we connected with artists who liked being represented in a quality context, where sound and artistic expression might have good chances to be taken seriously. DALI facilitated the recording studios, engineering, production management and final mastering.
The point of the DALI record label was to make sound quality stand out and open a window to a selection of Danish music. We haven’t made records for profit, but our label underlines our brand’s honest and humble interest in music and sound reproduction. More importantly, our recordings show how recordings can be made, contrary to today’s clear tendency towards a more superficial and less hand-crafted approach to the recording process. We are happy and proud to do that.
DALI is still designing and producing its own drivers and now the company has introduced Soft … [+]
Sparrow: Has the recent vinyl revival made an impact on DALI’s business?
Worre: We’ve noticed a remarkable impact from those looking for lost qualities of vinyl and the ritual of listening to carefully selected material. I see the vinyl revival as having three reasons: One is the pure retro fashion of both vinyl’s design and lifestyle. Another is the desire to search for the truly great recordings from the past, which were often, no doubt, better and more organic and human-hearing friendly.
The high-quality sound of those older recordings was often down to the skilled recording engineers who had to be resourceful to prioritize sound due to the apparent limitations of analog vinyl reproduction technology. The third reason is that vinyl is more of a protest against the many years of early digital and a sometimes uncritical, ideological obsession with technology.
Technology offers a road to better sound, but in many ways, it does not make anything better. Indeed, in some ways, it has made it worse. The protest may be partly unconscious, partly progressive. That is the case for audio reproduction in many cases. It’s certainly the case for the music industry, especially when it comes to rhythmic and popular music being over-produced, over-manipulated and heavily compressed in the mix and mastering process to maximize loudness. This approach has been escalating since the mid-1980s.
The vinyl movement reminds me of a quote from the British writer C.S. Lewis: “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
The DALI OBERON is part of the company’s home theater range. DALI also makes wireless speakers and … [+]
Sparrow: Your company now produces speakers, headphones, soundbars and home cinema systems. What’s the most significant innovation that DALI has brought over the last four decades?
Worre: In line with the vinyl debate, we know that technology messages may come across better if you can wrap your success in a revolutionary invention that claims to change the world, but that wouldn’t be true, so we won’t.
What we have achieved throughout our history has been significant but incremental innovations. These improvements have been mainly built on our existing directions. For example, when we introduced the planar magnetostatic tweeters in 1990 that turned into an iconic hybrid tweeter module, it was to extend the performance of some already great and more traditional soft cone/dome tweeters rather than throwing it all away and developing a brand-new technology from scratch like, say, a ceramic dome.
When we first introduced SMC to reduce ear-unfriendly distortion, it was a powerful tool, but only after we had pursued that route for many years using more traditional design tricks.
The DALI KATCH G2 is a recent addition to the DALI lineup.
Sparrow: Streaming has made high-quality music more accessible; how do you convince someone new to hi-fi?
Worre: We consider ourselves not just a supplier of hi-fi but, more importantly, a recruiter of people to the world of hi-fi. The latter is a downright mission both for DALI and for me. Thinking back to how life-changing it felt to discover the joy of listening to a great sound system in my youth, it has become an essential goal of ours to spread the word to a whole new generation of hi-fi-lovers. There are many routes into the world of hi-fi, but the inevitable one is a great sound demonstration.
Streaming is one of the modern paths and possibly the most important one considering that you can make stunning reproduction with good streaming if you cater enough for the equipment and the source material. But let’s not forget how well CDs can sound when recorded properly. Also, the intimacy and texture of great-sounding vinyl is another source. However, music streaming is here to stay, and it can be a source of infinite inspiration if you take the time to do qualified searches and don’t drown yourself in the endless options. Luckily it has also improved quality, provided you pick things carefully.
The company’s HQ has expanded considerably since the first DALI factory was built in 1986.
Sparrow: What’s next for DALI in 2023?
Worre: We will launch EPIKORE 11 this year. This new speaker has many good things we’ve learned during KORE’s lengthy and thorough development process. We will transfer this knowledge in a handier format. The EPIKORE 11 will still offer much of the unrestricted and ultra-transparent sound imaging and tonality that the KORE provides, but it won’t be cheap, although it will be more affordable than KORE.
On the headphone side of our business, we will launch the IO-12, the world’s first SMC-based audiophile headphones. The IO-12s have proprietary 50mm wood-fiber drivers with an all-SMC pole piece for reduced motor distortion and overall sonic transparency. The IO-12s feature a combined high-grade passive and active cable mode and support for Qualcomm’s AptX HD Bluetooth codec, making it the ideal companion for audiophile listening with a new and higher performance level.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.