⊚ WORLD PREMIERE ⊚

⌈ DIVINE ACOUSTICS is a Polish specialist company founded in 2003 by Mr. Piotr GAŁKOWSKI. It focuses on loudspeakers, but the offer also includes an anti-vibration stand, anti-vibration feet and a speaker cable. Divine Acoustics products are proprietary designs, significantly different from other products of this type available on the market. ⌋

HE AUDIO INDUSTRY IS NOT FOR "weak spirits". Difficult, requiring a thick skin in a business game and extraordinary sensitivity in terms of design and music, it confronts a man with both other engineers and designers, as well as music lovers and audiophiles. It is requires a constant balancing on the line stretched between rationality and the unknown. Few are prepared for it, which is why so few audio companies truly succeed.

And yet there is also such a prosaic matter as the need to stand out from others. Many manufacturers are following the beaten path believing that they will convince audiophile to choose their amplifiers, loudspeakers, cables etc. with their performance. However, audio cemeteries are full of such promising, often extremely interesting companies that were unlucky, their owners were not determined enough, or simply enough talent for one side or the other of the game.

That is why the case of the DIVINE ACOUSTICS company, whose BELLATRIX loudspeakers we are testing this time, seems particularly interesting to me. It was founded in 2003, so it is already eighteen, it has "grown up". From the very beginning, their loudspeakers - because this is what they specialize in - featured a form different from other designs, and at the same time one could hear, while listening to them, that their designer, Mr. PIOTR GAŁKOWSKI, had great musical sensitivity and that he knew what he wanted to achieve and and what he was doing.

His speakers featured wide front panels and the cabinets were shallow, and at the same time their finish was really classy (please see the ELECTRA GENERATION 3; accessed: 30/07/2021). In their design, Mr. Piotr paid attention to every little detail that would seem irrelevant to other engineers, such as the precision of the components used in the crossovers measured to several decimal places, he cut their leads to exactly the same length, he developed his own cable, which he used to connect drivers inside cabinets, and then the feet he placed the Bellatrix speakers on; more about it in the interview, which you will find in the same issue of "High Fidelity".

In short, he is really obsessed with getting thing perfect. In which it reminds me of another perfectionist who offers his own vision of a loudspeaker, namely CEZARIUSZ ANDREJCZUK from AVATAR AUDIO. I think they have a lot in common, even though both the techniques they use and the main goals are different. But it is precisely this approach that produces results that can only be obtained in this way. In the case of classic companies, such precision is absolutely unavailable.

An example of what eighteen years of playing perfectionism lead to, which, in addition, survived the collision with the Polish audio market, are the already mentioned BELLATRIX floor-standing loudspeakers. Their premiere was to take place just before the lockdown, so it had to be postponed - and the test you are reading is it, meaning the world premiere. These speakers are the culmination of all the earlier ideas of the designer, and also a "new opening", as Mr. Gałkowski told me.

"It turned out to be a good thing" - continues the owner of Divine Acoustic. "Thanks to spare time, I had an opportunity to improve a few things in the design, and most of all, I decided to devote myself to the company full-time." Earlier, for many years, he shared his passion between his professional career and the audio hobby. So we have the privilege, you and I, to witness the opening of a new phase in his - and his family - life.

▌ BELLATRIX

BELLATRIX is the most expensive speaker model from this Polish company and at the moment the only one. Other speakers will be available only while stocks last. These are quite large, slender, really good looking and beautifully made and finished floor-standing speakers, slightly over 120 cm high and 36 cm wide. I have focused on the 'beauty', but I cannot resist it - we are talking about one of the best-looking, original designs of this type on the market.

⸜ CABINET Their enclosure is not an ordinary box because it is octagonal in shape, with a wider front baffle and a narrow rear baffle. The front is tilted, which integrates the drivers in phase, but also directs the tweeter placed quite low directly to our ears. Some of the baffles, including the front, are finished with natural veneer - there are three to choose from - and two on the side with a special material coated with Teflon. It is a modern material that is pleasant to the touch, and at the same time durable mechanically. Inclined - a slight tribute towards the Sonus faber speakers - top is covered with a material that dampens it. It takes about 1.5 months to make one pair of speakers and break them in.

Bellatrix is a two-and-a-half-way, three-driver, TQWT bass-reflex design. In this type of design, the bass is radiated to the chambers, which change their cross-section towards bass-reflex port. The interior of the cabinet is not damped with soft materials, but only with rigid mineral plates made of material selected in listening tests. Inside, the speakers are reinforced with a plywood and steel grate, which results in a rigid and vibration-resistant structure. The stiffness is also increased by the aforementioned, partly metal top and made of one element - the reason was to avoid joints - steel plinth, powder coated in black.

The cabinet has a form of a multi-layer, multi-chamber box - this idea was named by the company Cabinet Resonance Control (CRC; by the way - we can find a lot of acronyms in the company materials, similar to the AUDIOVECTOR materials). The company pays great attention to the vibration damping and their controlled dissipation:

When designing the Bellatrix cabinet, we paid a lot of attention to reducing its unwanted vibrations. To minimize vibrations transmitted from the ground and to ensure the best mass-stiffness ratio, the Bellatrix base is a single piece made of steel.

source: company’s flyer

Inside, these speakers feature a complex structure with many reinforcements and elements increasing rigidness. Additional contribution is provided by the bass-reflex system, which is in fact a specially shaped tube running through a part of the interior.

The whole rests on four KEPLER feet. These are mechanically complex anti-vibration feet made in-house, in which the support point is mounted on semi-precious stones and ceramic ingots.

⸜ DRIVERS The tested loudspeakers use unusual, rare drivers. The treble range is handled by the Scan-Speak's 25mm ring dome from the Illuminator series, with a distinctive metal phase cone in the center. The mids and lows are entrusted to a pair of great looking ETON drivers from the Orchestra series. They have paper membranes, but made according to the proprietary method with embossing that stiffens them. The Scan-Speak offers a similar driver, but there the ribs are cut and glued, and here the entire surface is homogeneous.

One of the most important tasks that Mr. Gałkowski puts in front of the cabinet is loading the drivers, but also reducing vibrations. That is why he applied complex techniques of vibration damping of the drivers in his loudspeakers. The tweeter is embedded in a separate structure, the base of which is a rigid lossy element, on the basis of which the Kepler feet were later developed. The company called this solution CeraGem.

The Eton drivers, on the other hand, are mounted on vibration damping washers and bolted to rigid metal elements. The company called the solution Bascet Accurate Dampening (BAD). Let me remind you that Audiovector uses a similar way of decoupling drivers in their loudspeakers, and their solution is called No Energy Storage (NES).

⸜ CROSSOVER Perhaps the crossover is what determines the unusual artistic design of these loudspeakers and their sound. The designer of Divine Acoustics tries to eliminate vibrations, so the only way for him was to isolate the crossovers outside loudspeakers. In the Bellatrix model he went all the way in and "hung" the crossover "on the back" of the loudspeakers. But what a crossover! Its casing is shaped like a space fighter and has a multi-layer construction with an outer shell in a carbon fiber braid texture.

Through a rear „window” - a tribute to FOCAL and WILSON AUDIO loudspeakers - you can see great components, with copper Miflex KFPM-1 capacitors, aluminum Jantzen Audio Alumen, foil Miflex MKP-10, Jantzen Audio Z-Superior and Z-Standard, metallized, non-inductive resistors and cotton-insulated, self-wrapped OFC coils. There are as many as 51 elements, although electrically it is quite a simple circuit.

The manufacturer points out one more thing - the system is a structure with a single ground point for all correction circuits and all internal connections. As he says in the brochure, "it significantly improves the performance of the Bellatrix by improving their transparency, micro-dynamics and naturalness of the musical presentation." Needless to say, this solution has its own acronym - SGP, from Single Ground Point. While at it, let’s add that there are three others - the ESM, RF path and FDC, relating - respectively - to the order of charging the capacitors, the elimination of the voltage divider in the tweeter signal path and to the fully directional circuit.

The crossover frequency between the drivers was set at 250 Hz and 2.9 kHz. For the bass crossover is nominally of the 1st order and an appropriate compensating circuit was used to correct the coil impedance. Crossover for the midrange is also of the first order and it features a circuit with an "elliptical" response, i.e. with a steep slope following the driver’s frequency response - a similar layout is used by the American company Magico in their loudspeakers. For the tweeter they use a 2nd order filter and it is a double circuit with correction of the coil impedance.

When assembling the crossover the leads of the elements are cut to a strictly defined length, and the coils are weighted so that their impedance is consistent to a few decimal places. As Mr. Gałkowski said in the above-mentioned interview, the point was for all speakers in this series to be identical.

⸜ CONNECTORS An integral part of the crossover is internal cabling - company’s proprietary HALLEY model - and connectors. The latter were developed especially for the Beatrix model and are handmade by Mr. Gałkowski. He wanted them to have as few points of contact as possible and that the metal from which they were made - pure copper - would not be subjected to stress and heating during machining. As the designer emphasizes, they are also directional. We can use bananas or spades, and the external clamp, with a spring, is tightened with a single screw, as is the case with CARDAS plugs. The Divine Acoustics plugs are, however, much better made.

The loudspeakers cost EUR 9,000, but in Poland for the first year after the premiere - this test - they will cost only PLN 30,000 (Divine Acoustics told us that the promotion in Poland lasts until the end of September 2022 – the date of placing the order counts – and applies only to SMOKE and MOCCA finishes. The SNAKEWOOD limited finish is excluded from the promotion). In fact, looking at how they are built, it's hard for me to understand how the company will make any money on it. But what do I know ...

▌ SOUND

⸤ HOW WE LISTENED The DIVINE ACOUSTIC loudspeakers were placed exactly in the same place where the HARBETH M40.1 loudspeakers stand on a daily basis, and where 99% of other speakers sound best, and were set up by the designer himself. The distance from their tweeters was 293 cm, and from the listening position they were at a distance of 262 cm; the distance from the wall behind them was 83.5 cm. The Bellatrix tweeter stands on its feet at a height of 83.5 cm, which is lower than usual. However, the inclination of the baffle means that it is directed at our ears.

The loudspeakers were compared to the reference M40.1 I’ve mentioned and were driven by the SOULUTION 710 transistor power amplifier through SILTECH TRIPLE CROWN cables. The listening session was divided into two stages. In the first one we - Mr. Gałkowski, his friend, Mr. Marcin, and me (Session I) - listened to the speakers together. During the second one, I listened to them alone (Session II).

Recordings used for the test | a selection

→ SESION I
⸜ ANNA MARIA JOPEK, Barefoot, Universal Music Polska 016 299-2, „Promo Copy”, CD (2001).
⸜ ENYA, Enya, BBC Entertainment BBC CD 605, CD (1987).
⸜ ANDREAS VOLLENWEIDER & FRIENDS, 25 years live (1982-2007), EDEL RECORDS 0184552CTT (2008).
⸜ MIKE OLDFIELD, Tubular Bells II,WEA 4509-90618-2 (1992).
⸜ PHIL COLLINS, Serious Hits...LIVE!, Atlantic A2 82157 (1990).

→ SESION II
⸜ BILLIE HOLIDAY, Body and Soul, PolyGram/Mobile Fidelity UDCD 658, gold-CD (1957/1996)
⸜ FRANK SINATRA, Songs For Swingin’ Lovers!, Capitol/Mobile Fidelity UDCD 538, gold-CD (1956/1990)
⸜ LAURENCE HOBGOOD, BRIAN TORFF, PAUL WERTICO, Union, Naim Label ‎naimcd015, CD (?).
⸜ LAURIE ANDERSON, Homeland, Nonesuch 524055-2, CD + DVD (2010)
⸜ PINK FLOYD, Wish You Were Here, EMI Records/Analogue Productions PFR25/19075810342, SACD/CD (1975/2018)
⸜ ROGER WATERS, Amused To Death, Columbia/Analogue Productions 88765478842, SACD/CD (1992/2015)
⸜ TORD GUSTAVSEN TRIO, Changing Places, ECM Records/Universal Music K.K. UCCE-9185, SHM-CD (2003/2008).

»«

▌ SESION I

MARCIN Let me briefly tell you how we met - Piotr and I met during the second Audio Show.

PIOTR GAŁKOWSKI Yes, we met at the Central Station. We were sitting in a cafe in the middle of the station, me with another colleague, he with another one, and we heard that we were talking about the show. It was late and first it turned out that we were waiting for the same train, and then that we lived some 40 minutes by car from each other. That was 22 years ago. From then on we keep in close touch and exchange information about audio (emphasis - ed.).

MARCIN I became, a bit by accident, the first reviewer of all the loudspeakers that Piotr was developing.

PIOTR And he fretted about them very often, a lot ...

WOJCIECH PACUŁA But it's been probably a good thing - if you had found a man who would have just praised all the time, he wouldn’t be of any help to you but more of a burden.

PIOTR Yes, constructive criticism really helped me a lot.

MARCIN Sometimes I even felt guilty towards him. I often came to Piotr, who had previously talked about what he had already done and I was always impressed by how much work he put into it, how much it cost him - seemingly small corrections. But it was not always going in the right direction - often, when I was leaving his place, I had the impression that it was a kind of obsession, even madness on his side, I mean in how much attention he gave to the smallest details. That's why I was always reluctant to tell him that this wasn't IT ... But I had to tell him the truth or it wouldn't make sense.

With time, I appreciated this crazy attention to detail, to the millimeters to which he cuts the lead of the components in the crossover, to weighing the coils to a few decimal places - because it gave amazing results. It would be hard to believe the improvement if I didn’t hear it myself, so those who didn’t have such chance may say it is all just marketing, a way to stand out from the crowd. But it is not so. He showed me that these tiny details matter, they do work and I believed it.

PIOTR Such differences are easily picked up by the human brain. In controlled conditions, the difference of one millionth of an ohm is audible. Relating this to a picture, I would say that human hearing is comparable to the 64K resolution ...

WP But to the point - tell me your impressions regarding the sound of the Bellatrix loudspeakers in the "High fidelity" system?

MARCIN Compared to what I've heard before this is a huge step forward. I listened to these loudspeakers in three different systems, from a very cheap one - though well-thought-out - in a workshop room, and already then I was captivated by the sound, by its incredible tangibility, power, lightness and effortlessness. You didn't have to play loud to get a lot of information. In a large room I was a bit disappointed with the bass performance. After full cycle of break-in it leveled out, but what I can hear here is definitely at a higher level, the loudspeakers clearly opened up ...

PIOTR There is more tissue between the sounds ...

MARCIN Yes, but also more control. Here you can hear that this power amplifier controls the sound very precisely and the bass is on point. There is also a very nice, open treble, which I missed in Piotr’s system. I like this sound :) It's great, it's very good.

WP There is something like an internal structure of the sound on which everything else is built - if it is there, then "everything else will fall into place", and if it is not, you can do whatever you want with the top, bottom, but it won’t work out. This is why many recordings from the 1950s sound great, although the engineers did not hear most of what is on the tape because they could not - yet they were able to retain some truth about the recording without caring much for the "high" or „low” tones.

PIOTR I agree - that's why I often listen to prototypes while doing something in the next room. If the sound is good, that's where I hear it best, because I don't have to pay attention to details. With two young children I can't go crazy with volume level, so I also wanted these loudspeakers to sound equally well when playing quietly. I meant to use the power of the first few watts.

MARCIN We recently listened to Bellatrix with my 8 watt 300B amplifier. The biggest surprise was that he drove these loudspeakers with ease and openness. After a while I found myself thinking that I didn't need more power. It was a big surprise for me.

PIOTR Coming back to today's listening session, I must say that it sounded brilliantly - there was a lot of tissue between the sounds, a lot of "complexity", especially in the mid-tones, and all sounds were perfectly finished. And it was so in the whole range. Comparing to the near field listening test from my workshop, at first glance it seems that everything is similar - but it is not so. Here the system is so sophisticated and so well selected that there is a few times more of everything, as if there were two, three or even four times more information in each sound.

I will not say that it sounded brighter or darker, that there was more or less treble, because that is not the point, it does not matter. It's about the complexity of the presentation - providing a huge amount of information in such a way that the brain can accept it effortlessly, that it doesn’t give up after half an hour. It was important to me during the design phase and it turned out beautifully. I am very happy with what I heard in the "High Fidelity" system and I could stay here for the next few days :) ♦

▌ SESION II

AFTER WHAT I Heard during the joint listening session, I felt the need to immediately “explore” the bass capabilities of the Bellatrix loudspeakers. These loudspeakers offer an incredibly balanced, but also beautifully deep sound, in a way that resembles what I know from my Harbeths. What is interesting is that their designer had never heard the M.40.1 or any large loudspeakers from this company before - at least in controlled conditions. Perhaps it is so that the sensitivity of some designers is similar, which leads them - completely independently - to similar conclusions.

But I held back because that would be the easy way to take. The tested loudspeakers sound low, dark, dense, and their bass has an excellent timbre, so I would only confirm what I heard before. So I took focused on what is much more important, i.e. resolution and differentiation.

Dark sound, and this is how the tested loudspeakers sound, is associated by many music lovers and audiophiles with a closed sound, and yet it is exactly the opposite. Bright sound is a closed sound, because it almost always lacks information, but there is a gross overproduction of sound. The dark but resolving sound is one that does not attract attention to details at all. It allows us to listen to music without even knowing whether there are many details or not. We listen to it as if it doesn't matter.

It does matter, of course, but only from the "primary" side, if I may say so, before this information reaches us. Once we hear them, that is on the secondary side, they lose their meaning because they are only a part of the event, one of the elements of its structure, which introduces a full picture of the musical event.

Anyway, I focused on differentiation first. It turns out that Polish loudspeakers do it no worse than expensive loudspeakers, such as the Carmel 2 from YG ACOUSTICS, or the Classic 100 from SPENDOR to bring up only the most successful products of this type. However, they do it a bit differently, which makes them more similar to the Harbeths. After all, the difference between the first two albums I listened to, which were the recording of the LAURENCE HOBGOOD, BRIAN TORFF, PAUL WERTICO trio entitled Union, and another piano trio, TORD GUSTAVSEN TRIO from the album Changing Places, was incredibly clear.

The Union was recorded in a large room, the Union Church (hence its title) by KEN CHRISTIANSON on an analog Nagra IV-S tape recorder; its producer was Julian Vereker, the founder and CEO of Naim. Unlike in later projects, there were more microphones this time, mostly on drums. But the reverbs are natural, which resulted in a relaxed, slightly dark, not entirely clear, high-volume sound. The Changing Places, in turn, is a studio work of a large, excellent Rainbow Studios in Oslo, run by the late Jan Erik Kongshaug; it is a digital recording, i.e. recorded, mixed and mastered in the digital domain.

Both albums sounded excellent with the Divine Acoustics speakers, meaning dense, tangible, but also completely different. The Naim album had a more distant sound, although it was stronger than in the company's True Stereo recordings. In turn, the instruments on the ECM disc were closer to me. Interestingly, the reverb added to the mix was longer than the natural one from Union Church.

But both discs sounded incredibly coherent and fluent. This is the thing that - next to the bass - struck me immediately, despite the fact that during the first listening sessions I was sitting on the side. I confirmed this by listening to two monophonic albums - Body and Soul by BILLIE HOLIDAY and Songs For Swingin’ Lovers! by FRANK SINATRA, both remastered by Mobile Fidelity Lab, still in the old headquarters of this label, released on gold Compact Discs.

Recordings of this type are very difficult to reproduce properly, because the microphones used at that time - released in 1957 and 1956 respectively - had a clear resonance in the upper midrange, and in addition, they needed to convey the depth dimension, without using stereo. I was prepared for it, but it still surprised me how easily the Bellatrix loudspeakers created a large, full-bodied and dense presentation for me. The loudspeakers showed the sound closer to me rather than further away (similar to the M40.1), but they did not push the sound out in front of the line connecting them. The depth dimension was very good and stable - maybe not as clear as from the reference speakers, but it is very difficult to achieve.

The thing that caught my attention during this part of the listening session was the incredible ease - and this is the key word of this review - of showing color as well as dynamic shades. The Polish loudspeakers do not have the same “tangible” sound as the Harbeths, but they are, in turn, more full-bodied than the Spendor or YG Acoustics loudspeakers. Their "physicality" is perfect, for loudspeakers from this price range, but even twice as expensive designs usually cannot do it in an equally nice and endearing way.

Their timbre has a low center of gravity, although the treble is a bit more "present" than in the Harbeths, reminiscent of what I heard some time earlier with the Classic 100 loudspeakers of the British manufacturer. For years I have criticized the tweeter in the Harbeth M40.1, a fairly simple design, inexpensive, but with time I had to revise this opinion. It is so, that the better the components in the system feeding the Harbeth loudspeakers, the better these loudspeaker sound. In turn, excellent, exotic, expensive tweeters from other companies also benefit from it, but to a much lesser extend.

But to the point - the tweeter in the tested loudspeakers sounds beautiful, because on the one hand it is smooth and fluid, and on the other it delivers a lot of information. Its "attack" is a bit harder, more contoured than from the driver in the reference loudspeakers, but also from AMT or classic drivers with diaphragms made of beryllium or diamond. So it gives a slightly clearer and more selective presentation - slightly, but still. More important, however, is that this driver worked perfectly with the other drivers and it was hardly audible (as a separate one) - as I mentioned at the beginning. And yet we get a lot of information from it.

Low tones are saturated and dense - which brings me back to where I started this test and what gave me the most joy. At the end of the listening session I returned to a few discs I usually use to assess bass performance - for example PINK FLOYD’s Wish You Were Here, in the SACD version released by Analogue Productions, and LAURIE ANDERSON’s Homeland. It turned out that the loudspeakers sound low, but also resolving. The bass was not that low, and it was not as perfectly controlled as with the Harbeth, but comparing it with the loudspeakers costing up to 50,000 PLN, it did not lack anything. I have the impression that the loudspeakers could be placed 10 cm closer to the rear wall, which would fill this range even more.

On the other hand, the farther from the back wall, the better the stereo effect is. These are loudspeakers which, in the piece Falling from the Anderson’s album showed a wide, omnidirectional panorama, with many sounds coming from the sides and from behind my back. These sounds were not drawn with a precise line, they were rather "present". But at the same time, they had an amazing consistency that is difficult to achieve, regardless of the type of design and price. No wonder that a dog barking from the side, a sleigh passing between the speakers, and all the sounds encoded in out-of-phase on the ROGER WATERS’ Amused To Death, another album remastered by Analogue Productions, were perfectly legible and credible.

▌ SUMMARY

BELLATRIX Loudspeakers BY DIVINE ACOUSTICS are one of the nicer sounding loudspeakers that I have hosted at my home and one of the best Polish designs that I have heard at home. They sound in an incredibly well-ordered, calm, relaxed way, while bringing a lot of information about the recording. They do not point out production errors, but also do not cover them up - they go deeper into the recording, and do not slide over its surface. They are incredibly resolving and have good selectivity. They do not extend as low as the reference speakers in the bass, but I cannot blame them for that, because the bass has beautiful, well-differentiated timbre.

So I am pleased to award the tested loudspeakers with our RED FINGERPRINT with additional praise from the chief editor :) Yes, these are so good, so well-built and so perfectly made speakers. ■

Technical specifications (according to the manufacturer):

Design: 2,5-way, bass-reflex/TQWT
Mid- low- woofer: 2x 7” ETON Orchestra
Tweeter: 1x 1” Scan-Speak Iluminator
Internal cabling: Divine Acoustics Halley
Connectors: Divine Acoustics, single, pure copper
Feet: Divine Acoustics Kepler
Nominal impedance: 4 Ω
Sensitivity: 88 dB
Frequency range: 35 Hz-40 kHz
Recommended room size: 16-40 m2
Recommended amplifier’s output: 10-160 W
Speaker-amplifier accommodation period: ~48 hours
Capacitors’ break-in period: ~500 hours
Weight: 29 kg/pc.