So I've spent a few hours listening to them now and I have to say that I'm very very impressed. They are probably the most pleasant sounding and easiest to listen to speakers that I know of. Without a doubt some of the finest that I've heard. It's a similar experience to Quested monitors. They are incredibly detailed and yet so smooth at the same time. I'm a pig in poo right now. 
When I first set eyes on them I was a bit concerned by their small size but there was no need to be. They produce a huge sound that easily fills my largish high ceilinged room without any problems. They go loud and there's plenty of punchy solid sounding bass too. Obviously their small size limits the depth but there's all the bass you could ever want for down to about 55Hz at which point they rapidly roll off and have virtually no output below 50Hz. Personally I'll be partnering them with a subwoofer because I like lots of sub bass wub wub when listening to rave music, movies and computer games. But I doubt that a subwoofer is going to be necessary for most people and on their own these are all the speaker most people would ever need. I'm listening to a track from Snoop Dogg's Doggy Style album right now and the phat bass line that these produce sounds outstanding.
When comparing speakers I always use my Westone UM3x earphones to act as a constant and unchanging benchmark that I can take with me everywhere I go. To give you an idea of how good the UM3's are I can confidently say that no passive speaker that I've ever heard can match their clarity and only a small handful of multi-thousand pound active studio monitors sound clearer. The Westone's are great and it's a close call but the DM5 are slightly clearer sounding. High praise indeed!
One of the best tests for a speaker is a sine wave sweep. IME speakers that sound good with music inevitably perform well with a sine wave sweep and speakers that sound bad with music have their inadequacies laid bare with a sine wave sweep. Unsurprisingly the DM5's faired admirably well in this test. While there are a few slight variations in volume output across the frequencies they are still flatter than most. Much more importantly though is that there's no noticeable phase distortion which is what ruins far too many speakers and the crossover transition from woofer to tweeter is unnoticeable as far as I can tell. This is very rare and is impressive stuff!
The downsides? Well being active they need two cables per speaker which I dislike. I also miss the DAC and pre-amp that's built into the ADM9 and Neutron system that makes them sooo much more convenient to use. They don't have any kind of built in level adjustment so you really do need to use them with something that has a proper pre-amp built in. They can't be used straight out of the fixed gain RCA sockets from an O2 or Behringer DAC. But so long as they're used with the right source with a pre-amp this won't be an issue so there are no worries there. Just choose your partnering equipment with this in mind and there won't be any problems. They also work fine straight from the headphone output of a phone or MP3 player (and also from an AEX too so I'm told).
Overall these are such an incredible bargain. There's no comparison to other sub £1000 speakers - they just don't come close. They may only cost £700 but they are one of the finest sounding hifi systems that I've ever heard irrespective of the cost. Crystal clear right across the whole frequency range and with a stereo image to die for. These speakers just sound 'right' from the moment I started listening. It's a shame they live in the shadow of the forthcoming DM10 speakers because the DM5's deserve much more attention than they get.
Thank you Martin and Ash. You have another very happy customer here.
When I first set eyes on them I was a bit concerned by their small size but there was no need to be. They produce a huge sound that easily fills my largish high ceilinged room without any problems. They go loud and there's plenty of punchy solid sounding bass too. Obviously their small size limits the depth but there's all the bass you could ever want for down to about 55Hz at which point they rapidly roll off and have virtually no output below 50Hz. Personally I'll be partnering them with a subwoofer because I like lots of sub bass wub wub when listening to rave music, movies and computer games. But I doubt that a subwoofer is going to be necessary for most people and on their own these are all the speaker most people would ever need. I'm listening to a track from Snoop Dogg's Doggy Style album right now and the phat bass line that these produce sounds outstanding.
When comparing speakers I always use my Westone UM3x earphones to act as a constant and unchanging benchmark that I can take with me everywhere I go. To give you an idea of how good the UM3's are I can confidently say that no passive speaker that I've ever heard can match their clarity and only a small handful of multi-thousand pound active studio monitors sound clearer. The Westone's are great and it's a close call but the DM5 are slightly clearer sounding. High praise indeed!
One of the best tests for a speaker is a sine wave sweep. IME speakers that sound good with music inevitably perform well with a sine wave sweep and speakers that sound bad with music have their inadequacies laid bare with a sine wave sweep. Unsurprisingly the DM5's faired admirably well in this test. While there are a few slight variations in volume output across the frequencies they are still flatter than most. Much more importantly though is that there's no noticeable phase distortion which is what ruins far too many speakers and the crossover transition from woofer to tweeter is unnoticeable as far as I can tell. This is very rare and is impressive stuff!
The downsides? Well being active they need two cables per speaker which I dislike. I also miss the DAC and pre-amp that's built into the ADM9 and Neutron system that makes them sooo much more convenient to use. They don't have any kind of built in level adjustment so you really do need to use them with something that has a proper pre-amp built in. They can't be used straight out of the fixed gain RCA sockets from an O2 or Behringer DAC. But so long as they're used with the right source with a pre-amp this won't be an issue so there are no worries there. Just choose your partnering equipment with this in mind and there won't be any problems. They also work fine straight from the headphone output of a phone or MP3 player (and also from an AEX too so I'm told).
Overall these are such an incredible bargain. There's no comparison to other sub £1000 speakers - they just don't come close. They may only cost £700 but they are one of the finest sounding hifi systems that I've ever heard irrespective of the cost. Crystal clear right across the whole frequency range and with a stereo image to die for. These speakers just sound 'right' from the moment I started listening. It's a shame they live in the shadow of the forthcoming DM10 speakers because the DM5's deserve much more attention than they get.
Thank you Martin and Ash. You have another very happy customer here.
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