It’s been a couple of years since DALI whipped the necessarily large covers off its flagship ‘Kore’ loudspeaker. Forward-thinking and uncompromised in its engineering, suitably stratospheric in its pricing and (to be frank) with looks only a mother could love, it served – as so many flagship designs from so many loudspeaker brands do – as a design exercise, a statement of intent, and a test-bed for new technologies. Technologies that make their way down to loudspeakers to compete in the real world.
Yes, 2023’s Epikore 11 utilises some core Kore technologies – though it’s roughly half the price of Kore, it is still witheringly expensive. But Kore’s strengths are finally available to those of us who must work for a living. With its new Rubikore range, DALI has democratised some of these technologies to the point that a pair of the Rubikore 2 I’m reviewing here – the only stand-mounter in the five-strong Rubikore range – costs a mere £2,299 per pair.
Little to separate
Visually, there’s very little to overtly separate the Rubikore 2 from 2014’s Rubicon 2 stand-mounter that this model replaces. The cabinet is a very similar 350x195x335mm (HxWxD) and similarly curved at its front baffle and rear panel. Mind you, this is not automatically a bad thing – the Rubikore 2 is relatively good-looking in a purposeful way, and the standard of build and finish is impeccable. Each of the four available finishes – high gloss white, high gloss black, high gloss maroon and natural walnut – has something to recommend in aesthetic terms, and the description ‘high gloss’ has never been more appropriate or deserved.
On the curved rear of the cabinet, there are four extremely hefty speaker terminals for bi-wiring or bi-amping, which can accept bare wire, spade connectors, or banana plugs. Above them is an assertive ‘Continuous Flare’ bass reflex port tuned to 44Hz.
The front baffle, meanwhile, features a tweeter above a mid/bass driver in a long-established manner. The soft dome tweeter is, at 29mm, unusually large for a speaker of this size – and it takes inspiration from the original Kore design. It functions without the magnetic oil usually present in a dome tweeter design to provide both cooling and resonance damping. Still, DALI reckons it can manage without it and cites the improved speed of coil movement and enhanced dynamic response as compelling reasons.
The mid/bass driver beneath it is, at 165mm, a sizable unit too. It’s made of the paper-and-wood-fibre material that DALI’s been refining for years and has that customary rusty reddish-brown colour. But in this application, it is referred to as a ‘Clarity Cone’. It features five indentations that render it asymmetrical and thus more resistant to the resonances that symmetrical cones can be prone to. The driver features a potent double-magnet system that, says DALI, better focuses the magnetic field and reduces losses – and it also uses the company’s patented ‘SMC’ (soft magnetic compound) material in its motor system to minimise the braking effects that the more commonly used iron can introduce to voice-coil movement.
Dramatic looking
It’s quite a dramatic-looking driver array, but if you’re not keen on seeing it, there are cloth grilles behind which you can hide it. That would be a shame, although the fact that DALI, unlike most of its competitors, doesn’t use magnetic fixings but rather three physical lugs to keep the grille in place spoils the ungrilled look just a little. Lug holes are never a beautiful thing.
So, the Rubikore 2 is a two-way design with a nominal impedance of 4 ohms and an ever-so-slightly tricky 87dB/W/m sensitivity. According to DALI, the frequency response is 50Hz – 26kHz, with crossover occurring at 2.8kHz. Mundorf-sourced parts provide suitable fettling for the crossover, but there’s no sign of the SMC-Kore crossover inductors fitted to the floorstanding Rubikore 6 and Rubikore 8 models.
Attached to a Naim Uniti Star using QED XT40i speaker cable, positioned on a pair of Custom Design FS 104 stands, and pointing dead ahead—DALI is one of those few loudspeaker brands that doesn’t suggest you toe in its products towards your listening position—the Rubikore 2 waste no time in setting their stall out. And what a neat, tidy, and well-stocked stall it turns out to be.
There’s no genre of music these DALI refuse to get on with, and no recording is too rough and ready to be a lost cause. No matter what you listen to – and during the course of this test I listened to everything from Arooj Aftab’s Vulture Price [New Amsterdam] and The Smile’s Wall of Eyes [XL] to Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite (Radio Symphonie Orchester Berlin/Lorin Maazel) [Deutsche Grammophon] and Up For a Bit with the Pastels [Glass] – the Rubikore 2 are balanced, organised and non-judgemental. If you like it, they like it too.
High circumstance
Detail levels are high in every circumstance – and, no matter how fleeting or deeply buried in the mix, the DALI can put the details into convincing context every time. The soundstage they create is, given the right stuff to work with, notably well-organised and considerably larger on the left/right axis than the speaker cabinets’ physical boundaries. Tonality is carefully neutral, which means the only heat or suggestion of chilliness you might hear comes from the recording you’re listening to.
There’s some careful management of low-frequency impact – some competing designs will undoubtedly hit harder and with more substance. Still, no price-comparable alternative controls its low-end activity more carefully. Bass sounds are full-bodied, loaded with variation and straight-edged at the moment of attack – and consequently, the Rubikore 2 describe rhythms with absolute positivity and conviction. Momentum is such that the recording motor goes along most naturally and unforcedly. And when push comes to shove, the DALI can summon proper bottom-end impact – but it’s always in the service of the recording, rather than to intimidate.
The opposite end of the frequency range has more than enough substance to balance out the undoubted brilliance and bite the Rubikore 2 brings to treble sounds. There’s genuine shine and drive when a recording demands it—but, again, it’s properly controlled and never threatens to get out of hand, even if you like to listen at reckless volumes.
In between, the DALI communicate midrange information in a manner quite easily described as ‘lavish’. They reveal an absolute stack of information, parse it confidently, and seem to understand a vocalist’s motivations completely. They’re eloquent and expressive with singers of all types, and their confidence where soundstaging is concerned means there’s generally a pocket of space in which a vocalist can operate. This elbow room is never at the expense of the unity of the presentation, though – there’s nothing remote or estranged about how the Rubikore 2 positions a voice.
Journey to the bottom of the range
The journey from the bottom of the frequency range to the top is smooth like a dewdrop – the crossover point is imperceptible, and the DALI don’t over- or understate any area. They have the effortlessly deep-breathing dynamic potency to put significant distance between the quietest and loudest, most intense recording passages – always handy when Igor Stravinsky is involved. Most impressive is the casual, unforced, and utterly direct way in which the Rubikore 2 demonstrate their command over almost every aspect of music-making.
Some listeners will mistake this even-handed, poised and uncoloured presentation for lacking passion or engagement. Others will want a bit more bang for their buck – although they’re not an undemonstrative listen, these DALIs. Still, they aren’t about to demean themselves with unwarranted low-frequency activity or unnecessary forcefulness. What they are about is as faithful a rendition of music and as complete an explanation as possible of the electronics driving them as possible, which is, for most listeners, as much as they might realistically hope for. Or, that’s how it seems to me.
Specs & Pricing
Type: Two-way; bass reflex ported stand-mount loudspeaker
Driver complement: 1 x 29mm soft dome tweeter; 165mm ‘Clarity Cone’ paper/wood pulp mid/bass driver
Frequency response: 50Hz – 26kHz
Crossover frequency: 2.8kHz
Impedance: 4 Ohms nominal
Sensitivity: 87dB/W/m
Finishes: High gloss white; high gloss black; high gloss maroon; natural walnut
Dimensions (HxWxD): 350 x 195 x 335mm
Weight: 9.5kg/each
Price: £2,299, $3,630, €2,598 per pair
Manufacturer DALI A/S
Tags: LOUDSPEAKER DALI STANDMOUNT
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By Simon Lucas
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