Definitive Technology Demand D15 Floorstanding Speaker, Right and Left, Gloss White
SKU: DEDEMAND15WK
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About Definitive Technology Demand D15 Right
FEATURED REVIEWS
Pleasantly Surprised!
This is the second day that I have had wonderful speakers. I was a little hesitant at first to order them since I have a pair of Def Tech BP8040ST that I have had for a half dozen years or more, and the powered subs in both speakers took a dump. I figured that getting the D15's without the subs would be pretty safe, so I stepped up to the plate. I sure am glad I did it, they are beautiful. From the way they were packaged and how the base and parts came in a presentation box. When I finally go...
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Totally worth it
Replaced Infinity Beta 50s, these have much better base even when they have much smaller enclosure. I did not find the lower 85.5 db sensitivity an issue for the 18x18 room when using a decent AVR. More linearity, clean mid-base which I was missing earlier. Imaging is excellent, extremely good highs, really living up to the $3000 plus a pair in sound, looks and build quality.
Tall, slim speakers are certainly in fashion, and it's hard to imagine many slimmer than Definitive Technology's new Demand Series D15 towers. Despite housing three 5.25-inch drivers (two carbon fiber woofers and a polypropylene midrange), a 1-inch aluminum dome tweeter, and not one but two 8-inch side-firing passive radiators, the D15 measures just 6.5 inches wide and thus indeed requires its bolt-on aluminum bottom plinth to achieve stability.
Def Tech has always balanced serious value with serious performance, and the Demand series clearly maintains the tradition. But while the firm's top-range calling card has from inception been bipolar designs, with both forward- and rearward-radiating drivers and on-board powered "subwoofer" bass sections, the Demand series breaks rank, placing conventional, monopole (forward-only), fully passive designs at the top, price-wise at least, of Def Tech's offerings for the first time.
The D15 is the second of two Demand series tower designs; the slightly larger and costlier D17 employs 6.5-inch drivers and 10-inch passive radiators yet specifies bass extension only a few Hertz lower with a modest 2 dB gain in sensitivity. To fill out our test system, the company included the Demand D5C center-channel unit and a pair of D9s, the middle of three bookshelf speaker offerings, for the surround channels, all in the gloss-white lacquer that is one of two finish options (piano black's the other).
Tall, slim towers producing smooth octave-to-octave balance across the house, resonance-free response; broad, gradually falling-off dispersion; and smoothly contoured, generally similar off-axis responses.
These once-rare virtues are encountered ever more frequently, thanks at least in part to the computer-aided engineering, modeling, and measurement that have become common practice. This leads in turn to what many might characterize as a boring sameness of result. Boring, that is, only in the sense that most airline flights, thanks to aviation's own advanced technologies, produce similar results: reliably smooth, crash-free trips.
The Demand Series D15 towers, in short, are very fine reproducers, and in any room they sound considerably fuller-range than their fairly modest 48 Hz (-3 dB) bass extension spec suggested. The track "Royals" (24-bit/48kHz FLAC, Qobuz) by Lorde opens with a loose orchestral bass-drum strike (real or synthesized—I can no longer tell these days), with fundamentals probably around 40 Hz or so and dipping lower on the decay that obligingly repeats every downbeat.
