It’s that time of year when introspective folks start looking back over their year, and when I do that with regard to my work here at SoundStage! Access, I see a few unintentional trends. Early in the year, my efforts were focused heavily on integrated amps. To be fair, that’s sort of my beat and not out of the ordinary. The middle of the year was dominated by a long run of vinyl coverage. And lately, for whatever reason, I find myself reviewing more speakers than usual. This month’s offering is the Dynaudio Emit 30, a slim, petite two-and-a-half-way tower speaker that sells for just $1699/pair (USD).
Right off the bat, one thing that impressed me about this pair of speakers was Dynaudio’s presentation and packaging. This is my first review of any of the beloved brand’s offerings, so maybe this is the norm. But simply having a speaker box that is designed to be opened from a horizontal position is a big plus for me and anyone else with eight-foot ceilings.
Crack open each box and you’re met with a speaker that’s neatly and securely packaged. It’s odd but heartening to see a model this large packed in expanded polyethylene foam instead of the dreadful, crumbly, wasteful mess that is expanded polystyrene. There are even little cutout compartments (which you can see above between the flat box holding the speaker grille on the right side of the image and the pack-in literature on the left), which hint toward some economically packed accessories. What’s in there, though? We’ll get to that in a sec.
First, a look at one of the unboxed speaker grilles. The magnets are strong and beefy, but other than that, there’s not much to say about speaker grilles, is there?
And here, a look at those smuggler compartments and their contents. Turns out that’s where Dynaudio packs the outriggers, along with the carpet spikes, bolts, washers, and such.
Here’s a closer look at one of those outriggers. Above and behind it, you can see the cylindrical rubber inserts that form the feet if you choose not to install spikes. I think I’m going to go that route. Either way, I like that the choice between spikes and no spikes is simple and flexible.
And here’s a quick peek at the pack-in literature. It’s not as data-dense as you might assume at first glance, given that it’s really only a couple of pages of information repeated a gazillion times in different languages. What I really love, though, is that Dynaudio understands its audience. The focus on technology, but with an eye toward design and refinement, is excellent. The price tag may be proletariat, but the literature is all kinds of bougie.
Here’s another thing that might not be obviously cool unless you’ve had the misfortune of unboxing tons of tower speakers: you don’t have to actually take the speaker out of the box before ridding it of its endcaps. The padding is split and lifts out the way you’d expect with, say, an amp or source component. All of this makes the Emit 30 so much easier to handle.
The only thing that doesn’t have its own little cubby hole is the pair of port plugs that come with each speaker, hinting at its dual-port design. They just sort of tuck into the empty space surrounding the cabinet, and in most installs, they’ll likely stay in the box. But it’s nice that they’re there just in case.
Here, we see the underside of the speaker after its extraction from its shipping container. The threaded holes for the bolts that secure the outriggers are clear and unambiguous. This is also a nice look at the walnut laminate that covers the cabinet. White and black laminates are also available, but the walnut looks spectacular, and I’m glad my review samples were clad as such. On the left side of the image, you can also see the design of the Emit 30’s black baffle, which is beautifully and intricately sculpted and every bit as classy as most everything else about the speaker.
Here’s a quick shot of the hardware that comes with the outriggers. Each of them—four per speaker—has to be installed one at a time, but the process goes pretty quickly.
As mentioned above, I decided to go with the rubber tootsies instead of spikes. You can see what those look like once installed here. There’s a good amount of grip, and the feet hold up well to a bit of shuffling and repositioning. They’re easy enough to pull out, though, should you need to. But it does take some intentionality.
Not much to say here except that the binding posts are nice. It’s worth noting that there’s only one pair, so no biamping with this one. That makes sense, especially at this price.
Moving up the back of the speaker, here’s a close look at one of the lovely flared bass-reflex ports.
Moving around to the front of the speaker, you can see that the Emit 30 comes with a protective cover over the tweeter. It’s magnetically affixed and not super-easy to dislodge, but neither is it in any way difficult to remove. A twisting motion, I discovered, is the easiest way to smoothly remove it.
With the tweeter uncovered and my camera repositioned, we not only get a better look at one of the 5.5″ magnesium-silicate polymer woofers, but also the 1.1″ soft-dome tweeter itself, which Dynaudio calls the Cerotar tweeter. You can’t really see it from my images, but one of the reasons for the magnetic protective cover is the fact that the dome sticks out past the plane of the baffle. As such, this might not be the speaker I would recommend to people with rambunctious toddlers.
Stepping back to get a look at the pair of Emit 30s, both front and back, gives you a sense of the overall excellent design and build quality, especially for the price. What it doesn’t necessarily convey, given the lack of much else in the photo to provide a sense of scale, is how petite the speakers are. Without the spikes, the top of each cabinet measures in at around 36.25″ from the floor, and tweeter height is right at 34″. That’s quite low, but how it affects performance, I of course don’t know yet. That’s going to be one of the first questions I seek to answer when I dig into my full subjective evaluation. Keep an eye out for that review in the next couple of weeks.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
