These speakers took me eight years to build, from the first procurement of drivers to the final setup of the crossover v2.0. How did they turn out? Are they worth the wait and the money?

I have been living with the system for two and a half months now. I have gone beyond the first impressions. Let me see if I can put down in words something which is essentially hard to verbalise: the sound of a system.

The original hope

By the time I started building the enclosures last year, I had completed three flavours of the Asawari, lived with the JX92S single-driver speakers for a few years, and had listened to some extremely expensive commercial speakers (more than USD 50,000 a pair) plus some excellent DIY systems. Based on this exposure, I had begun to expect some things from the Darbari, and also yearn for some qualities -- which I was not sure the Darbari would be able to fulfil.

I was hoping that the Darbari would be able to give me:

• Low distortion: I had heard this with a few speakers, and I knew that it reduces listening fatigue in strange ways. Even if we keep aside grossly distorted sound, and just compare two different high quality speakers, there is a perceptible difference if you can push down distortion as low as possible. And today, speakers generate two orders of magnitude more distortion than amplifiers and digital sources. This is even more true with passive crossovers. Therefore, I was hoping to get low distortion from the Darbari.
• Good voices: How realistic could voice reproduction get? Could they handle Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, Gangubai Hangal, Kishori Amonkar, Bhimsen and Shirley Bassey, all without compromise? The sharpness and edge in Shirley Bassey's voice or the gruffness in Gangubai's immediately pushes any speakers to their edge -- most speakers either sugar-coat these sounds or sound harsh. I have heard Gangubai live -- her voice was sheer delight. Most speakers don't do well there. On the other hand are well recorded albums of the deep male voices -- most speakers give you the deep fundamental tones but miss out on the texture and detail. I was hoping to get something special here. I was betting on low-distortion metal cones and the three-way split of frequencies.
• Detail without edge: This has always been my dream. I don't like the caramelised so-called "valve sound" -- it seems too rounded for me. And being a disciple of the Linkwitz school of audio systems, I have tried listening to real life sounds. I know they are not always sweet. Violins are not always sweet, birdcall is not, flute is not, voices of children are not -- most things are not, I guess. I want accuracy. And getting details is difficult if I neither want the harshness of edgy treble, nor the rounded sound of sweet sounding systems. My Wharfedales were "inoffensive" -- they were a touch rounded, taking the excitement and foot-tapping edge out of music. I wanted "real" this time.
• Good soundstage: This is a side-effect of carefully measured and designed crossovers and good, inert enclosures. I had found it easy to achieve this with the Asawaris, given their good cabinet construction. I was hoping to do as well with the Darbari.
• Better bass: I wanted to see what I could get when a separate driver was dedicated to just the 2-3 bottom octaves, and when the midrange handling the human voice did not have to handle the massive excursions of the low end. All my speakers till then had been 2-way. It would be interesting to add a dedicated woofer and use a midrange for true mid duty.

After two and a half months of living with the Darbari, I seem to have achieved pretty much everything which I was hoping for.

What I am experiencing

Here is what I am getting.

• Clean sound: This is the most astonishing characteristic of the Darbari. I have listened to so many speakers, but I have very rarely heard speakers which sound so clean. This means that nothing sounds harsh, rounded, or rough. There is lower listening fatigue here than any other speakers I've heard for extended periods. (Brief auditions of very expensive speakers don't count, because one can't form a clear impression of their sound easily.)

  Some speakers sound smooth and therefore slightly boring. Others have an edge which makes you sit up and take notice of transients and excitement factor, but they also have a hardness which brings with it the onset of listening fatigue. Most good speakers (including the Asawaris) sound good on most material, but show these problems with some tracks. The owner instinctively begins to avoid those tracks, and begins to say, "Oh, I somehow cannot relate to Singer X" where actually the problem is with the reproduction. Typical examples of such borderline singers are Shirley Bassey and Billy Joel. With the Darbaris, I have listened to an enormous variety of music from all genres, and I have yet to find an album which makes me withdraw or feel on edge.

  A famously hot mix with edgy sound is Remo's album "O Meri Munni". I used to believe one can only listen to it on cheap systems which have poor treble extension. I listened to that album from end to end last night, without the slightest trace of fatigue. I always felt my old Wharfedales had the inoffensive, slightly rounded sound which made music sound boring, and yet this Remo album used to sound edgy and hard to listen to. I am confused why the more detailed Darbari does not have any edginess with this album. All of a sudden, the fun element in the finger-snapping foot-tapping numbers of the album come alive, free of the hard edge.

  In short, I am not experiencing any listening fatigue, even with difficult and edgy material.

  Not everything is listenable, though. Kishore Kumar of the early seventies, the golden era of Hindi playback singing, is hard to tolerate. Tried listening to the two everlasting gems from Mili, "Aayi tum yaad mujhe" and "Badi sooni sooni hai", and just sat still, hating it. Surprisingly, "Kaa karun sajani" by Yesudas from Swami, circa 1977, is quite tolerable though not great. But most of the great Hindi film songs from the early and mid seventies sound like they are coming out of tin cans. Come down a few years, and Kishore's "Huzurgone farmaaya ki apne payro-pe khade hoke dikhlaao" from Laawaris (1982, I think) is just fine, because recording quality had improved.

• Detail: There are lots of detail, without any of the hard edge I associate with some hyper-detailed speakers. I can hear separation of instruments more than I have heard with the Asawaris or with any other speakers I've listened to for a long time. Nothing sounds muddied or jumbled. Even here, not everything is equally clear. Poorly recorded albums sound more muddy than better ones. Queen albums continue to break my heart with their muddy, distorted sound.

  This has been a dream come true: detail without the edge. I am confused what is giving me this sound quality. Is it the fact that I have no passive crossover? Is it because of the low-distortion drivers? Is it because I have steep slopes in the crossover which allow each driver to do its job in its proper range? I have no idea. I am still lapping up every minute of listening time I get.

• Soundstage: I have never heard such good soundstage from any other speakers I've listened to for long periods. The Asawaris do not have this degree of solid soundstage. I can literally walk towards the speakers and the illusion of sound placement remains solid till I am almost in the plane between the speakers.

  With most other speakers, you get an impression of soundstage with the sharper sounds -- e.g. the attack edge of the lead guitar will give the impression of having precise placement, but the sustain of the bass guitar won't. Here, even the lower frequencies seem to give much more precise placement than what I've heard with other speakers.

• Bass: is deeper and cleaner than with the Asawaris. I had initially felt that it was too weak for the really hard-hitting disco or rock drum tracks (the drum crescendo at the beginning of "Money for nothing" from "Brothers in arms"). But I am now changing my mind -- I think that what I'm getting is probably adequate. I will need to listen carefully to speakers which have more powerful but as clean bass as the Darbaris, to make up my mind about what I want. For now, I am happy.

  The bass extension may be a matter of taste, but the cleanness of the bass is very real. The Ray Brown Trio really comes alive and speaks to the listener here -- the key to their sound is the double bass of Ray Brown. The song "Sister Rosetta goes before us" from Raising Sand, with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, has some very deep drumming, which emerges beautifully. This is very pleasing. And movie soundtracks sound very good too -- I do not need any more oomph for cannon fire or explosions.

This is where I am right now with the sound. We are at the fag end of 2014. I think the Darbari is an excellent pair of speakers, and will probably compete head-on with conventional (i.e. passive crossovers) commercial speakers costing upward of USD 30,000. Let me see how my experiences change with age.

Some feedback

In May 2016, two friends came visiting, just 7-10 days apart. Both came to listen to the system.

One friend, Apratim Mukhopadhyay (LinkedIn, Enter Cerebrum) has several years of training as a singer, and has been a singer-songwriter for three albums of Bengali songs. For those albums, he's composed the music and done the arrangement of instruments, synthesised the music for instruments, used session musicians, and done the post-processing. He's also done music direction, arranging, mastering and mixing for several other albums for other bands and performers. He understands good sound, but is not an audiophile. He's in his forties.

He came and listened to a few tracks he was very familiar with, including material recorded by HMV / Saregama in the seventies and eighties. He was astonished with the clarity and accuracy of the sound. In his words:

Usually, when you listen to music through a music system, one big thing that you hear is the sound of the system. Due to this, the playback sound you hear is never the same as the original live performance. With your system, it is as if the music system is disappearing, and I am hearing the original performer's voice and the instruments directly.

Another friend, Salil Bhayani (Deccan Chronicle article, home page) is in his late twenties. He's been passionate about music since his school days, and has had several years of training in Hindustani classical vocal singing. He later moved to music composition and arrangement. For the last three years, he's been studying at the Berklee College of Music where he's heard some of the most famous composers and performers of the western world, plus a lot of performances from the rest of the world. He's worked on mixing and mastering musical pieces using the sophisticated mixing equipment at the Berklee recording studios. He listens to the Boston Symphony Orchestra on an average once a week, and can easily pick out differences in styles by different conductors for the same piece.

He spent three hours listening. He too was thrilled.

This is the clearest, most accurate system I have heard in my entire life. Without exception.

Listening to music here is like listening to a multi-track system. I can almost hear each track separately, I can see exactly what the mixing engineer did with each track, what levels he set, where he goofed up. Mixing becomes so easy with a system like this.

There is a lot of detail, but no glare, no listening fatigue.

Wow! (when listening to Tocatta and Fugue in D minor, one of his favourite pieces)

This feedback helped me understand the Darbari's performance further.