Meet the Demand
RATING
TALL, SLIM speakers are certainly in fashion, and it’s hard to imagine many slimmer than Definitive Technology’s new Demand Series D15 towers. Despite housing three 5.25-inch drivers (two carbon fiber woofers and a polypropylene midrange), a 1-inch aluminum dome tweeter, and not one but two 8-inch side-firing passive radiators, the D15 measures just 6.5 inches wide and thus indeed requires its bolt-on aluminum bottom plinth to achieve stability.
Def Tech has always balanced serious value with serious performance, and the Demand series clearly maintains the tradition. But while the firm’s top-range calling card has from inception been bipolar designs, with both forwardand rearward-radiating drivers and on-board powered “subwoofer” bass sections, the Demand series breaks rank, placing conventional, monopole (forward-only), fully passive designs at the top, pricewise at least, of Def Tech’s offerings for the first time.
The D15 is the second of two Demand series tower designs; the slightly larger and costlier D17 employs 6.5-inch drivers and 10-inch passive radiators yet specifies bass extension only a few Hertz lower with a modest 2 dB gain in sensitivity. To fill out our test system, the company included the Demand D5C center-channel unit and a pair of D9s, the middle of three bookshelf speaker offerings, for the surround channels, all in the gloss-white lacquer that is one of two finish
