Arjan

Precisely. As I said before, a sub woofer setup with small satellite speakers. They may well sell (look at Bose, Beats etc, although the price is a tad high for that segment) but they're not an audiophile product.

If you're looking for bass, you might well like the Phantoms. In that respect they were very impressive. Hence my earlier comparison to sub-woofer systems with small-ish satellite speakers; the bass sounded big, but mid-range and treble clearly sounded like coming from a much smaller speaker. For me, voices and sense of scale are very important - the ability with live music to visualise the room and pin-point where each musician is on the stage - something you should be able to expect at this price point. Listening to classical and big band music, there was no sense of the scale of the stage. Also, voices lacked warmth. It just seemed that the mid-range drivers maybe could not pick up well in the (for them) lower end of the frequency range. So the bass was impressive, I just found the rest lacking. I hope that helps.

The room did not help, but I listened to a different (admittedly more expensive) system in the same room and that sounded much better.

As I don't seem to be able to edit my earlier post, separately a correction to what I wrote earlier: I used 'tight and quite dry' to describe the bass, which was a poor choice of words as it might be incorrectly interpreted. The bass was not woolly (although the small glass demo room did lead to some boom), but what was actually impressive was that it did not at all sound boxed-in. Unfortunately, the latter WAS the case for mid and treble, so it just added to a sense of the bass being overblown. We also briefly listened to a Devialet 200 with B&W floorstanding speakers in the same room, which sounded much better. That sounded much more realistic, more open and more evenly distributed across the frequency range.

One correction to my earlier post: I used 'tight and dry' to describe the bass, which was a poor choice of words as it might be incorrectly interpreted. The bass was not woolly, but what was actually impressive was that it did not at all sound boxed-in. Unfortunately, as the latter was the case for mid and treble, it just added to a sense of the bass being overblown.

Well, we have an upright Dyson hoover, because it saves space. But it does not come without compromises. It's compact and looks great, but it is incredibly noisy, cleaning corners is a fiddle and every time I empty the thing I wish we had a Miele to clean up the mess that ensues. Which brings me to the Phantoms. I listened to them yesterday at Harrods in London and came to the conclusion that they are a lifestyle product - not an audiophile product. For all the hyperbole the Devialet uses about how perfect the Phantoms are, to me they sounded like a sub-woofer setup with small-ish satellite speakers. There was a LOT of bass (volume-wise), which is impressive from such a small enclosure, but that was the very clear focus of the demonstration. The bass was tight and quite dry, but its character was more suited to a home cinema set up than a music lover's system. The Phantoms seemed far from linear across the frequency band, with a strong focus on bass and a (perceived) gap in the lower mid-range to the upper bass. Voices sounded restricted (little projection outside the speakers) and treble lacked real sparkle. The design may appeal, even be useful, like with Dyson hoovers. The idea of saving space looked very attractive. But for me, the Phantoms compromise too much on sound quality to be a serious contender. Based on sound quality alone, the Phantoms can be beaten for less money.