Dynaudio Music

Dynaudio styles its four wireless multiroom speakers as ‘Intelligent wireless music systems’. They do things a little differently.

Dynaudio Music 1 Dynaudio Music 3 Dynaudio Music 5

An “intelligent” wireless music system, so Dynaudio declares its four-strong ‘Music’ collection of wireless speakers. They rise in size, power and abilities from the smaller Music 1 and 3, both with internal batteries allowing them to go walkabout, to the two larger domesticated models in the Music 5 and 7.

In this they seem quite similar to several other longer-standing offerings in the wireless multiroom speaker market. But Dynaudio does aim to deliver a difference, notably in sheer size with the Music 7, which presents itself an impressively wide 82cm from angled edge to angled edge, or 74cm across its button-laden brushed aluminium top. Even the Music 5 is still quite the presence. And of course Dynaudio’s longevity as a speaker manufacturer of renown gives some further expectation of quality to their build, and their audio performance.

All four models offer multiple paths to music. They all have Bluetooth, with the higher quality aptX codec if your Android phone supports it, whereas iPhone and Mac owners can achieve CD-quality streaming using AirPlay. When connected to your home Wi-Fi they can access internet radio, and they can be made to play music from DLNA-shared music on your network. Then there are direct inputs, which rise through the range. They all have a USB slot into which iOS devices can play, and from which other devices can be charged — especially handy on the portable models to keep your phone charged while playing music from it. Those small Music 1 and 3 models have a minijack auxiliary input; the Music 5 adds an optical digital input, and on the Music 7 you get an HDMI input which can be connected to an ARC-equipped TV HDMI socket, to play the audio from your TV. Dynaudio has opted not to include an Ethernet connection for your network, so all the streaming is done via either Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

“full and dynamic — significantly above the quality of sound you might expect from a ‘wireless speaker’. Dynaudio’s strengths in drivers and voicing can be appreciated here.”

The ‘text’-style chat (see ‘The app’ panel) extended to speaker set-up. Using AirPlay set-up from our iPhone, the app whizzed through the connection to Wi-Fi without requiring so much as a password. After the few minutes that took we were quickly enjoying music. When it comes to actually playing music, the app does its own thing with Tidal, and has internet radio. For everything else, it’s Bluetooth, AirPlay, third-party apps, or the external inputs. It’s notably less useful with Spotify, as the Dynaudio units don’t support Spotify Connect. Of course you can use your own smart device’s Spotify app and either AirPlay it or Bluetooth it to the Dynaudio, though this double-streams (from the internet to your device, then on to the player), and gets a potential quality loss if your phone’s Bluetooth profile doesn’t include aptX.

Sensibly, then, Tidal is encouraged, to avail you of the full Dynaudio intelligence experience. The’intelligence’ extends also to adjusting acoustics for variable positioning,

using RoomAdapt so that the Music units “sense where they’ve been placed”, optimising volume and tone even on the fly, “calculating as it goes”.

There is also a NoiseAdapt option, one marvellous description being that the speakers “actively sense the vibe in the room… and then they roll with it”. We presume this ‘rolling’ involves pushing the EQ to overcome, say, party chatter.

Finally, there’s the multiroom side of things once you have more than one of the Music units on the same network. The app makes this grouping process super-simple — you simply drag and drop speakers to create a group, then undrag again to release them.

Conclusions

There are a few things omitted here: no Spotify Connect, UPnP only possible using a third-party app. But the Dynaudio systems score highly on audio quality, three of the four really surprising for their size. We also note some very favourable street pricing at present, which may indicate something new coming, but meanwhile, bargains to be had.