Dione: the Diva
Devialet Dione soundbar
If you thought the soundbar in our previous review represented an upmarket offering, well, you weren’t looking high enough. If you crane your neck rather more and peer up towards the mountaintop, you may just be able to pick out the price level occupied by the Devialet Dione.
Nearly four grand for a soundbar isn’t entirely unprecedented: Sennheiser has its Ambeo soundbar (see News p10) at the same level. And both of these lofty offerings are bars which work on their own, with no subwoofer alongside for the frequencies that most bars are simply too small to deliver.
Build & features
If you haven’t heard of Devialet, you may have at least seen this French company’s distinctive ‘Phantom’ active speakers (pictured below), widely praised for their remarkable abilities to create high sound pressure levels with minimal distortion from a compact design. But the company’s innovations in amplification are of equal importance to its speaker technologies — and of course both come together in a soundbar design.
And while not as superficially bonkers as the Phantoms, there’s no mistaking the unusual looks of the Devialet Dione (pronounced as is Celine’s surname, we were told during a briefing to EISA editors, not to rhyme with ‘phone’). Most notable, of course, is that central orb, or as Devialet calls it, ORB®. If we understood Devialet’s lead engineer correctly, this contains one active driver and two passive ones, though we couldn’t guess how that all fits together into a sphere, even
