Devialet has always been on the frontier of producing great sounding all in one speaker but they have always been expensive as heck for the average consumer. But now, there’s a new kid in town.
Devialet has revealed a new Bluetooth speaker, named the Phantom Reactor.
The Bluetooth speaker will be available in two variants, a 600W, and a 900W version. The former will cost $1000 while the 900W version will sell for $1200.
With such a cool name, it would be appropriate for the speaker to deliver excellent sound quality. And that it does. The speaker would be the cheapest product available by the French company.
Regardless it will still set you back a thousand bucks, which is still a lot if you ask. But given the company’s incredible attention to detail and unmatched sound performance, you will get exactly what you paid for.
The audio company is looking to expand its user base to include people who want to get their hands on a Devialet device, yet cannot afford one. Although Phantom Reactor will remain a Bluetooth speaker, it will be much more than that.
The bluetooth speaker will be a lot smaller than a lot of Devialet devices and will weigh 10 pounds (4.5 kg). This is still heavier than your average Bluetooth speaker, so it wont be as portable as lets say an Amazon Alexa.
So forget ever taking it on the beach with you. But at least you won’t have to dedicate a whole room, just for the speaker.
Pierre-Emmanuel Calmel, the CTO of Devialet said that the company had to redesign everything from scratch. The speaker will have a tiny touch control on top of the device, which will have all the settings, modes and play/pause functionality etc.
It can connect to users’ computer or phones via a variety of connectivity options such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Airplay, UPnP, Spotify Connect and AirPlay. There’s also a built-in audio jack, for wired connections. Users will also be able to connect with multiple speakers via a later update.
There is microphone aboard the Devialet, so users cannot control it via voice commands. The company didn’t want another Google Home or Amazon Alexa clone. Its main focus was to create a speaker that had unmatchable sound quality. So their focus was entirely on sound.
CEO Franck Lebouchard said, “We are completely focused on sound quality. We want to be platform agnostic with Apple, Amazon or Google. Our idea is that we want to make our speakers compatible with all the protocols from those companies — but our business is sound quality.”
Users will still be able to use the device as a kind of a pseudo-assistant by connecting one of the voice assistants to Phantom Reactor. Users will be utilizing the voice assistant’s AI but will use the Reactor’s speaker.
Lebouchard said that it’s just a really good speaker without any distortion, background noise or saturation added to the signal. Don’t judge Phantom by its size, it can get very loud.
The Phantom Bluetooth speaker will go on sale from 24th October and preorders start from tomorrow.
Jazib Zaman
Jessica Baron, PhD
