DALI Mentor Menuet and Nola Boxer Loudspeakers (TAS 203)

Two Counter-Punchers

Many people equate the size of a loudspeaker with a commitment to high-end values. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most of us live in a world of limits. We don’t have a Gulfstream waiting on the tarmac, a rosso corsa sports car in our palazzo’s garage, or even a small auditorium for our stereo. Fact is, a well-executed smaller speaker of the stand-mounted variety can in many instances get us further down the road toward the musical truth than hi-fi “wisdom” suggests. Consequently, there are more of these real-world speakers on the market today than ever before. But within this extremely popular segment are varietals targeted for specific applications and room sizes. Cases in point: the DALI Mentor Menuet and the Nola Boxer. Both are designed by highly respected companies, both are two-way compacts suitable for smaller environs, yet each fills a distinctive niche.

It’s easy to be fooled by a small speaker that measures a mere 10 inches tall. Don’t be. DALI has jammed a lot of technology into this highly musical, two-way, bass-reflex design. Beautifully crafted, the enclosure has a smoothly curved and seamless front baffle designed to be an acoustically inert platform for the drivers. And DALI installs rubber gaskets to decouple those drivers from the cabinet and provide an airtight seal to it. Internally, the Menuet features a flared upward-angled port, which has been designed to minimize turbulence and reduce port noise. The angled design also permits a longer port, which results in a lower tuning-frequency than what would ordinarily be possible in an enclosure of this volume.

The Menuet borrows its soft dome tweeter from its larger siblings. The tweeter uses an oversized 28mm voice coil rather than the typical 25mm one. Its dome diaphragm is very lightweight, which allows DALI to make the diaphragm substantially larger than the average dome without sacrificing speed. The power-handling of this transducer has been further enhanced via a powerful motor system with a neodymium magnet and back-mounted aluminum heat sink. The 4.5” woofer incorporates DALI’s wood-fiber cone—a technology derived from its flagship Euphonia models. DALI points out that the wood fiber adds stiffness, ensuring non-uniform break-up characteristics.

As I alluded to earlier, the Menuet is designed to fill a specific niche—to be elegant and unobtrusive. Tuned for placement against a rear wall or boundary (shelf- or wall-mounting is also encouraged), it gathers significant mid/upper-bass reinforcement in this position. DALI’s placement recommendations should be scrupulously followed, because once you find the speaker’s sweetspot—about a foot-and-a-half from the rear wall worked wonders in my room—the Menuet sounds most cohesive, gathering energy from the back wall, bulking up in the 50–60Hz range, and finding its inner Superman to yield results that are utterly musical and compelling. With that wall reinforcement there’s more acoustic and ambient recovery going on, particularly with symphonic, chamber, and jazz recordings. Without the reinforcement, the Menuet will have a prevailing balance that could generously be characterized as “light,” lacking in weight and drive.

The Menuet embodies a size-defying sense of tonal refinement and restraint that too often goes missing in this segment. This particular mini doesn’t push excess treble energy at the listener, nor does it try to reach beyond the physical limits of its small bass transducer. The Menuet is truly expressive in its handling of vocals. It’s fast and coherent, able to elicit details from a cappella singer Laurel Massé on Feather & Bone [Premonition]—from her dark chest resonances to her rich breathy top octaves. The speaker is capable of sustained high output, yet remains very controlled. In tonal balance, it’s civilized, even a bit polite in the upper mids, but has no precipitous dips, spikes, or ridges. Yes, the presentation is lighter weight, something that lends the “air” in the upper octaves a drier, more papery texture and that smudges harmonic detail a trifle. Foundation-rattling bass is clearly out of the question, and dynamically it’s no hell-raiser. These constraints dampen the large-scale liveliness of the Menuet, although it does a beautiful job reproducing midrange and treble micro-dynamics.

However, those interested in the intimacy of a quasi-nearfield experience will discover a whole new relationship with the Menuet. Up close and personal with the Menuet, you’ll discovers a fifth gear. It shines in this environment; closer proximity means you can ramp down big-room playback levels, resulting in more open dynamics, greater soundstage depth, and finer detail. The Menuet really begins to dance rhythmically and vanishes from the soundstage without a trace. Orchestral scale is miniaturized—no big surprise—but this is easy to adapt to given the enhanced sense of weight, dynamic thrust, and pressurization in the nearfield environment. I developed a great fondness for the musical honesty of the DALI Mentor Menuet. To be sure, it’s a small-space/nearfield specialist, but for those desiring a sweet taste of the high end without hijacking the room, my highest recommendation goes this bite-sized and big-hearted Danish treat.