Can it really be that the £200 Zensor 1 is as good as it gets?
Awhile back I bought a pair of Dali Zensor 1s on EBay; Fantastic little speakers. Really, really astonishing. Fluid, natural, enthusiastic, fast, coherent and capable of resolving huge amounts of detail.
So good, I wanted more. The Dali Oberon 1 design, much more expensive, was disappointing - a lesser, more constrained design. Boring, next to the Zensors. I sold them.
Mentor Menuets? Over £1000. Much preferred the Zensors. Sold them, too.
An alarming number of Dali’s high end designs are available on EBay and elsewhere, both new from dealers (presumeably not selling on demonstration) and from disappointed buyers. Nice veneer, shame about the sound?
Dali appears to have lost it’s chief designer. Or he is spread too thin. Many, many designs. At least 5 separate ranges. Mostly a paper and wood-fibre cone and over-sized dome tweeters - I suppose there is a limit to the variations possible with such simple ingredients, and yet Dali really DO have something, particularly with those main drive units.
Yet it is a sorry situation when a £200 discontinued model beats several models higher up in their own range.
Sometimes a simple 2-way bookshelf design is hard to beat, so you could say this is a 5* review, but, if more expensive designs fail to represent a convincing upgrade, or not an upgrade at all, then Dali may be over-reaching.
I would not now look to ANY of their more expensive designs for an upgrade.
I, for one, couldn’t care less about expensive veneers when the sound simply didn’t measure up.
1 January 2024
Unprompted review