Dali Oberon 5
Sometimes manufacturers hit the spot so accurately that we can only sit back and applaud. Dali’s Oberon 5 is one such product.
There are no magic ingredients here, no cutting-edge technology to explain the Oberon 5s’ unusually talented nature. Just careful engineering and steady refinements of design ideas that Dali has pursued for years.
The Oberon 5s are compact two-way towers, standing just 83cm high and just more than 16cm wide. The dimensions mean they will look right at home in most rooms, never dominating visually. The MDF cabinet is nicely made and there are four finish options: black ash, white, dark walnut or light oak.
Speaker design
There are a pair of 13cm mid/bass drivers and a larger-than-usual 29mm soft-dome tweeter. The mid/bass drivers use the company’s favoured wood fibre/fine grain paper pulp cone, which is claimed to deliver the drive-unit Holy Grail of high rigidity with low resonance. Here, though, the engineers have worked hard on the motor system and suspension set-up to optimise detail, transparency and dynamics.
The three drive units are linked through a single-wired two-way crossover, resulting in a sensitivity of 88db/w/m and nominal impedance of 6 ohms. These figures are typical and shouldn’t present any issues for any good price-compatible amplifier.
Like most Dalis we’ve tried, these speakers don’t have a fussy nature. When it comes to positioning, the Oberon 5s like to be a little away from the back wall and firing straight ahead, rather than angled towards the listening position.
As for partnering electronics, you’ll get out what you put in. The Oberons will sound perfectly acceptable with good budget electronics such as the Marantz PM6006UK amplifier and partnering CD player, but feed them with something more ambitious, such as the Rega Elex-r (£950) or even Moon’s 240i (£1990), and they shine accordingly.
Once given a few days to settle, these are terrific performers. They’re responsive and musical but, most of all, fun. We start with Radiohead’s In Rainbows and the Dalis sound right at home among the complex rhythms and dense production. But they bring out the emotion too, highlighting the haunting nature of Videotape or the uplifting change of gear in 15 Step’s instrumental break.
Abundant talents
The Oberons possess dynamic subtlety, rhythmic precision and transparency in abundance. They’re detailed too, revealing low-level instrumental strands with ease, but also managing to arrange that information in a composed and organised way.
Dali speakers are rarely shy when it comes to treble output. And, sure enough, these speakers have a crisp high-frequency output with plenty of bite. It’s smooth enough, though, to avoid sounding brittle, and it blends seamlessly with the speaker’s expressive midrange performance. The Oberons sound great with voices, squeezing the last drop of emotional impact from Nina Simone’s heart-breaking Strange Fruit. We move onto Prokofiev’s Romeo And Juliet where the Dalis show-off their fine dynamic reach and ability to render lowlevel shifts with skill. They will play loud enough for most situations and in all but the largest of domestic settings. They’re compact speakers, but those twin mid/ bass drivers still deliver plenty of low-frequency punch and authority.
Means of expression
Overall, these speakers manage to sound notably larger than they are. The Fyne Audio F501s dig even more deeply into the bass, but lack the sheer expressiveness of these Dalis. That, and the sheer sense of fun that these speakers communicate, is what endears them to us the most.