Sound Stage: Not being satisfied with having to sit in one spot to truly enjoy the music, I wanted these speakers to sound great in a living environment, to have a large sweet spot. The idea is to be able to move around the room while maintaining the image of a realistic sound stage/concert hall. The offset dual-tweeters, selection of speaker cone materials with proper dispersion characteristics and the cabinet shape and construction all help to achieve this goal. The five drivers function as a single point source, and the two channels dissolve into a perfectly imaged sound stage.

Listener Fatigue: One thing that is clear to me is that I will not build a speaker that emulates other stereo speakers or focuses on ‘showroom wow’. Being a musician and coming from the pro-world my final reference is the source… real musical instruments. Not surprisingly by following this criterion we have a speaker that is very ‘musical’ and has virtually no listener fatigue. (To accommodate different rooms and ears, it does have a three-position tweeter switch with a range from flat to ‘bright’).

Cabinet Design: I wanted to build cabinets of a timeless elegance that would befit virtually any home. They are constructed of solid hardwood with dovetail joinery and an organic, old-world style, hand-rubbed oil varnish finish. This finish process takes three – four weeks of application and buffing to produce a deep, fine furniture luster.

In 1992 when I founded Daedalus Cabinets, I experimented with many cabinet materials, and found solid hardwood to be the most ‘musical’. This does not mean that it unduly ‘colors‘ the sound. Any wood material cabinet will have some effect on the sound, and the very small contribution a hardwood cabinet makes to the sound is simply a more musical one than man-made materials. (Years ago JBL tested various cabinet materials and found a concrete culvert to be the ‘best’. It seems that stiffness, not just density is the criterion.) For any wood product to work it has to be very carefully braced for stiffness, and solid hardwood is at least three times as stiff as MDF with a similar density. One could argue that a 100lbs. hardwood cabinet can be at least as stiff and 'neutral' as an MDF cabinet weighing 300 lbs!

Frequency Response: The DA-1 has excellent bass extension, while still being exceptionally tight and detailed. I opted to not sacrifice clarity just to get a deep booming bass that’s better handled by a separate sub. Don’t get me wrong, these will shake the walls, (they rock the concrete slab here!). The concept is to keep the bass tight with lifelike transients, and if you have a room large enough and want extreme bass below the limits of hearing then you can get a good sub and have it all.

The measured anechoic chamber response is virtually flat; few studio monitors are this accurate! But more important, the typical room response is also smooth and detailed; these are shall we say, user-friendly speakers made to be lived with.

Efficiency: The DA-1 boasts a sensitivity of 96db 1w/1m; this is 6-10db more efficient than almost all other home speakers. This doesn’t only mean that you can play music at full concert levels, but that with typical listening levels, the system has a huge reserve of headroom. What this translates into is incredibly low distortion, exceptional detail and unrestricted dynamics. Dynamics like this can draw you into the music as if you were at a live performance. (Of course the Daedalus speakers can actually be utilized as a live sound-reinforcement system.)

Details, Details… The DA-1’s hand built passive x-over network is designed and built by Guy Veralrud. Guy is one of the ‘behind the scenes gurus’ of speaker design. He has taken great care to insure that all engineering parameters are correct, to give us a system that is fully phase and time aligned and that maintains a very stable impedance, all of which are critical for proper imaging.

All internal cabling utilizes Silver-Sonic 14ga. wire. The silk dome tweeters are made by Vifa and the 8”and 5” drivers are made in the United States to our specs. All connectors are gold plated, crimped and secured with a touch of silver solder. The binding posts are heavy gold plated brass that accept banana plugs or up to #4 Awg. Cable. Even the tweeter switch is mil-spec with platinum contacts.

Wood choices are solid Red Oak, Cherry or Walnut; we use renewable North American hardwoods only, (please don’t ask for a Rosewood cabinet). Internal bracing is Red Oak for maximum rigidity.

The finish is at least seven coats of hand-rubbed oil-varnish, (an organic product made in the United States), buffed to a rich fine furniture finish that makes others look like plastic.