Loudspeakers

With most speaker designs putting all their focus on a single tweeter for optimal imaging, the Epikore 11’s hybrid arrangement – marrying the same 10x55mm planar-magnetic driver seen on the KORE with a slightly larger 35mm (in place of 32mm) soft dome – may seem counter-intuitive. After all, integrating one tweeter with midrange and bass is hard enough…

In fact, the configuration here is all about balancing the requirements of an extended upper frequency limit while also extending downwards to integrate with the midrange driver. In the Epikore 11, the planar driver works up to a heady 34kHz, and crosses down to the dome at around 12.5kHz, this then handing over to the midrange driver, mounted close to the hybrid tweeter, at 3.1kHz. The large dome size also better matches the horizontal dispersion of the film driver at crossover – all part of DALI’s ‘Wide Dispersion Sound Design Principle’ and the avoidance of ‘beaming’ at high frequencies. Both drivers are of in-house design and use neodymium magnets, that larger 35mm dome and the planar magnetic driver combining to improve the power handling of the high frequency section. After all, the Epikore 11 is specified for use with amplifiers rated up to 1kW/8ohm!