Hey, this is Chris with World Wide Stereo once again, and today we're having a look at the new
sound bar from Devialet, the Dione.
With its modern stylistic design and 17 individual drivers and pivoting center channel,
Dione is sure to elevate the home entertainment experience for anyone looking for big cinema
sound in a lean and sleek package.
Needless to say, the Dione has a lot to live up to, which begs the question,
How good can a sound bar really be? Let's find out.
Founded back in 2007, Devialet is an acoustical engineering company building
and designing luxury cutting-edge technology.
Probably most well-known for their powered speakers, Phantom I and II, Devialet strives
to create outstanding, class-leading performance in any category.
If you've ever heard the Phantoms before in person, you'd know this to be true.
Their amplifiers and earbuds aren't forgettable either.
Everything I've seen come from them has been an excellent example of top-notch engineering.
When I first saw the Dione, I was immediately curious.
Devialet have some of the most unique-looking speakers on the market, and I think that trend
continues with Dione.
The orb is such a cool design for a center-channel and is taken right out
of the Phantom's playbook. Unboxing the Dione was a breeze.
Clearly-marked boxes for all accessories, which fit together perfectly.
Nothing was loose or rolling around.
Devialet even put indicatory stickers on where to grab the soundbar to pull it out of the box.
Once unboxed, I had the Dione hooked up and playing music in about 10 minutes,
which is great considering the thing I was most curious about was the sound.
Before we get to that though, let's talk about what the Dione comes with.
In the box, we have everything you need to set up the sound bar and get it working.
Here's what you get. A wall-mount template and wall-mount accessories,
a power cable, HDMI cable, TOSLINK optical cable, a manual and warranty documents.
If you're a do-it-yourselfer, you're going to love the included wall-mount guide.
It shows you exactly where to drill into your wall if you want to mount it.
I also want to note that Dione does not come with its own remote like many other popular
sound bars these days.
However, Devialet does offer a remote that's sold separately that will work with the Dione.
So, if you want a tactile way to interact with the sound bar instead of relying on the app or CEC,
I would consider picking one up. Now, let's talk about the design.
Dione is striking in its appearance, thin and sleek with dark-gray cloth-covered grills
across the front and the top, and, of course, the orb nestled neatly into the top
of the sound bar.
A very modern aesthetic that's clearly influenced by their other products.
I think it's a really awesome callback.
The orb isn't just shaped like that for aesthetics, though.
If you were to wall-mount the bar, you can actually fully rotate the center channel
around to face a different direction. Okay, now buckle up.
We're going to get in-depth with the core technologies that make the Dione tick.
To start off, we have everything a sound bar should have.
For wireless options, we have Airplay 2, Spotify Connect and Bluetooth 5.0.
Really, the big three options.
For physical connections, we have HDMI ARC and eARC, along with CEC.
In case you aren't familiar with CEC, it stands for Consumer Electronics Control and is a
standard being used with many devices that use HDMI to communicate back and forth,
most commonly used to send power and volume commands to an audio device.
So, you can use your TV's remote to control the sound bar.
And, of course, with the 5.1.2 channel array it supports both Dolby Atmos decoding and playback.
Pretty much all these features are standard on most high-end sound bars, but what really
sets the Dione apart are what they describe as their three core technologies.
Number one is the new patented spatial audio processing, aptly named SPACE.
This can be enabled or disabled in the app easily by pushing one button.
Anything you listen to can be upscaled to 5.1.2 channel surround sound.
If you're listening to something recorded in stereo, it will add a sense of height,
increasing the sound stage both vertically and horizontally.
It also will add height channels to content recorded in standard 5 channel surround sound.
Number two, we have AVL, Adaptive Volume Level.
This is always enabled and analyzes the signal continuously to boost dialogue and reduce bass
on the fly.
A lot of content on TV can be mixed in a way where louder effects like explosions
or background music can override key dialogue, and this really helps.
Number three is ADE, which stands for Advanced Dimensional Experience.
Devialet uses beamforming audio technology to actively recreate directionality and produce a
better sound stage. It's also the reason for the 17 individual drivers.
Some of the drivers are set up in pairs, with one being the primary driver and the second being
used for beamforming.
Beamforming is a really clever technology to focus soundwaves in specific directions using
constructive and deconstructive interference.
We could go in-depth with soundwave technology and how soundwaves interact,
but I think we're going to leave it there for now.
Beyond those three, Dione also has some core technologies found in Devialet's other products
as well, like their ADH amp and SAM profiles.
The Dione uses the exact same chipset that is found in the Phantoms.
It uses a class-A pre-amp and class B power amp measured at 950 Watts RMS.
Packing tons of power in a small space is something that Devialet has perfected.
The same goes for their SAM profiles. SAM stands for Speaker Active Matching.
Devialet has incredible amounts of profiles for hundreds of speakers.
They measure and generate a DSP curve to get the maximum performance out of each driver.
While designing the Dione, they measured each individual driver to design a
profile that is active at all times.
One tidbit Devialet let me in on is, with SAM engaged, you cannot blow the woofers of the
soundbar, as it will limit the excursion to prevent them from ripping themselves apart.
Now, with all that out of the way, let's pop the grilles off and look at the
speaker array itself. Voila.
Now, you won't normally need to remove the grilles, but it's a nice feature to make repairs and cleaning
much easier, and it's also for us to show off the speaker array itself.
Like I mentioned earlier, the Dione has 17 individual drivers comprised of 9
full-range speakers and 8 high-excursion subwoofers.
Together, the Dione dips as low as 24 hertz and up to 21,000 hertz.
The 17 drivers are divided into 8 specific audio channels, a left, center and right channel up-front,
along with 8 subwoofers combined into a single low-frequency effect channel with 4 drivers in the
front and 4 drivers in the back, a surround-right and surround-left channel and 2 height channels.
These drivers will also automatically reassign themselves different channels depending on
if you want to mount the sound bar or not, thanks to the built-in gyroscope.
You can also manually select which orientation it is in using the app.
The top two speakers become your left and right channel and the front, left and right become
your height speakers. And that brings us to the orb.
A full-range driver with two passive radiators that can be rotated to face forward no matter
the orientation. A pretty slick design choice.
Now really quickly I want to show you what it would look like when you actually flip the
sound bar around into its wall-mounted position.
So first you just rotate the orb around like this and then you would flip the sound bar
over itself like so. It's pretty heavy, too.
And you can see now that this is what it would look like, with the speaker grills on
at least, on the wall. Your Atmos channels right here and here are now your front, left and right
channel. And your left and right channel that were the left and right when it was on the table
are now your Atmos channels.
The left and right surrounds are still here, but they swapped orientation.
So your left and right have now become your right and left.
I've mentioned Devialet's app and how it can control Dione a few times now.
To clarify, Devialet has actually added support for Dione to the app you would use to control
their other products like the Phantoms. You get control of a few things here.
Play, pause, skip forward and skip back, plus volume control for whatever you're listening
to are prominently displayed.
You can also swap between the different audio modes like Stereo or Spacial.
You also use it to set up the Dione for the first time and run the room calibration.
We could spend a lot of time on the intricacies of Devialet's app, but just know that it does
everything it should need to do.
Now that we have thoroughly gone over the feature set of the Dione, I'm sure the question
at large is how does it sound? And I'm happy to say that it rocks.
I've been using the Dione for just over a week now and have loved it.
I've been bouncing between watching series and movies and listening to music, and it
exceeds in both. When listening to music, I bounce between Stereo Mode and
Spacial Audio Mode, depending on what I was listening to.
For acoustic or older recordings, I found Stereo Mode to be the most enjoyable,
but when I was listening to more modern EDM tracks like Opus by Eric Prydz, it was
awesome to use Spatial Audio Mode.
Some of the effects used sounded like they were coming from outside the sound bar,
which was a wild experience. I also listened to Coldplay's newest album, "Music of the Spheres",
which was recorded in Dolby Atmos.
I played that back using my Apple TV with Apple Music, and it was the first time I was able to
listen to the Dolby Atmos version. It was crazy.
I could hear the harps in Coloratura floating overhead, which was something I never was
able to enjoy before on my regular home stereo.
For home theater, I tested this watching back a few scenes from "Star Wars" and "The Witcher".
If you're looking to demo a surround sound system, I recommend the podracer scene
from "Episode I". I got a profound sense of directionality from the podracers zipping by,
and the low rumble of the engine starting up convinced me that the subs in the bar were
doing the work of a traditional subwoofer, which I was a little skeptical about at first.
Glad I was proven wrong, though.
The other scene I recommend, which is far more graphic, was the scene at the end of
the first episode of The Witcher, where the main character is swaying his sword around,
taking on a group of bad guys. Every sword swing has a huge sweeping sound effect that
really came through on the Dione. If you're looking for a compact surround-sound system,
the Dione should be on the top-end of the list. In larger spaces, the beamforming and
reflection-based audio loses some effect, but is perfect for smaller or medium-sized rooms.
This is a fallback for a lot of Dolby Atmos sound bars nowadays, where they rely on
the fact that the audio will bounce off your ceiling or off your walls to create the illusion
of speakers in those locations. The Dione is no exception to that, but is excellent in
a smaller room. We tested it here in the showroom in a larger environment,
and a lot of the people thought it sounded a little bit weak, but once I took it home to
my apartment and brought people over to listen to it, everybody was blown away by it.
Overall, the Dione is a fantastic sound bar and a great first step for Devialet into the world of
home theater. Support for every key feature a sound bar should have, with Dolby Atmos,
Airplay, Bluetooth, and CEC. Add that to Devialet's advanced engineering and you get
not only a fantastic-looking sound bar, but a fantastic-sounding sound bar as well.
Thank you for joining me for our review of Devialet's first sound bar, Dione.
You can learn more about this online at worldwidestereo.com or, if you're in the area,
you can stop by our showrooms in Ardmore or Montgomeryville, PA.
We offer 60-day returns, free shipping on all orders and we're authorized
dealers for everything we sell.
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This is Chris with World Wide Stereo. Thanks for tuning in.
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