Opinion 1

I already had the opportunity to have a successful test session with the eponymous Polish brand Destination Audio. And this brand has already a fair share of success on the market. Diehard users of analog know very well, that the hero of that sparring was, in my opinion, one of the best phonostages available on the market. It used the WE417A tubes throughout. As befits a responsible representative of extreme High End, the design is very elaborate, because it consists of an uncompromising power supply and an equally meticulously constructed amplifying section, that works with the delicate signal from the phono cartridge. And this is not all the important information about it, because for fans of this type of technical solutions, an additional flavor is the fact that in the bowels of this phono preamplifier the manufacturer uses only selected NOS (New Old Stock) tubes. I did not delve into the subject of how it deals with this challenge, but the important thing is that it is a kind of standard, that gives a design certain uniqueness. Why do I elaborate so strongly on the issue of the components used by this manufacturer already in the opening paragraph? I assure you that it is very important, because this company, located near Warsaw, also applied the same approach in the case of today’s meeting hero. And the tested hero are the highly effective Destination Audio Nika horn speakers. And those are not typical run-off-the-mill loudspeakers, because the drivers used in them are also NOS, but in a technology known only to the brand’s owners, they are properly technically refined or appropriately regenerated in order to achieve the desired sound. This, of course, means that, just like the mentioned electronics, the speakers are made to individual order, which begins the arduous search for components, which, after appropriate „rejuvenation”, would be suitable for use in the ordered product. And the best thing is, that despite such restrictions, there is no shortage of orders. Intriguing? Do not worry, this is a rhetorical question, because I am sure it is. And if I am not mistaken, I have no choice but to invite you to a few paragraphs about what happened to me during a dozen or so days of communing with the already mentioned Destination Audio Nika.

Let us not fool ourselves, Nika is a huge loudspeaker. Maybe not high compared to my German ones, but being forced to neatly fit a bass speaker with a large diameter and at the same time secure sufficient volume to offer a good quality lower range, they are unnaturally wide and deep. Fortunately, the designer civilized them a bit and from the wide obverse of their casing, decorated with vertical rubber bands a la Sonus Faber, they relatively quickly converge in a smooth arc to a single sharp edge of the reverse. That is why I have to admit, that at the beginning, the Nika slightly intimidated me, even though I am in contact with large loudspeakers on a daily basis, but they also quite quickly gained my recognition thanks to the described design. Probably a very important role in such a metamorphosis was played by the beautiful natural veneer finish, of not only the main box, but also the large enclosure on top of the main chassis, rounded similar to the side walls, horn enclosure for the midrange section. An additional curiosity is the application of the tweeter under the rubber bands above the bass driver. As for the connections, each loudspeaker is equipped with single terminals on the inside of the box. Of course, following the number of vintage, but revived, drivers used, as I mentioned in the opening paragraph, we are dealing here with a 3-way design with an sensitivity of 99 dB at 8 Ohm.

What did the slightly squat Polish speakers, but equipped with large-diameter bass drivers desired by the majority of music lovers, treat me to? Of course, what I expected, i.e. a pleasant to the ear and very desirable by a large group of instruments flavor of cellulose in the creation of virtual entities. You could hear it from the first note. However, what is very important, everything is served with great taste and coherently as rarely before. The point is, that despite the large size of the horn waveguide for the midrange section, a significant part of this band was also reproduced by the lower range driver, and the tweeter in the center of these two sound generators, in order not to spoil the great consensus between them, did not jump ahead of the line with excessive expression. I will not say, sometimes I had the impression that perhaps it was a bit too conservative, but during a telephone consultation with the constructor, I found out that this was intentional. The treble is supposed to be a properly integrated spice, not self-paced, and thus degrading, to the aesthetics of equal sound. After such an explanation of the matter, everything became clear and after accommodating with the proposed look at music in the aesthetics of the splendor of this type of construction, I was happy to start verifying the capabilities of the tested Nika. And I will not say, thanks to the described aesthetics I had many interesting reproduction of music that I seemingly knew inside out, but as it turned out, with one small „but” – it was completely alien to me, when looked at from this side. What is the deal with this „but”? Well, the speakers are large and with a large horn reproducing the center of the band, so due to the too small distance to the listening position, caused by the limitations of my premises, building the reality of the virtual stage in the domain of depth suffered a bit. The sound simply had no chance to fully consolidate the sources. Of course, you could hear a nice depth, but I had the opportunity to meet these speakers in a different reality, and I know that developing vast amounts of space behind them is something they master with ease. But I can assure you, what they presented clearly showed why many of you like in such constructions. A large bass driver meant a fast impulse of the lower range, which allowed the music to maintain the right timing even in the most demanding passages of the double bass and the contour of the projections of the instruments playing in this band, and the cellulose coating gave the music a touch that has long been considered a model of the natural school of playing of a system. Of course, taking into account my amplification section in the form of a powerful transistor, not entirely fitting in the ideal canon of configuring effective speakers with a delicate tube, but the presentation that was the result of the marriage of what I have at home with those phenomenal speakers was top notch.
To confirm that, I did not have to look long, because the first thing I saw was Michel Godard’s album with an arrangement of C. Monteverdi’s baroque music „A Trace of Grace”. Naturally, I am thinking first of the excellent performance of the serpent (a multi-coil horn) used by the frontman, with a specific timbre of sound, with its nasality and phenomenal depth of decay. I have admired it many times, but in the performance of the Nika speakers it was a masterpiece. As for other aspects, the saxophone showing the wood of the reed and the fully controlled bass guitar, phenomenally floating on the floor with the modulation of each sound, but without any signs of blurring, sounded equally excellent. I have heard them in many hardware adaptations, but this one was like coming from a different fairy tale. Analyzing this album, I could write paeans for a dozen or so sentences on literally every topic of this production, but knowing that I mentioned the most important aspects, I will move on to another repertoire, take from the opposite side of the barricade, a strong hit with rock madness.
What landed in the player? Of course, AC/DC with my favorite album „Highway To Hell”. Effect? Well, the coating of paper and the use of it on the speaker diaphragms created a kind of feedback, that resulted in the hardness of the presentation of the lower and the mid ranges, and the clear toning down of the treble did not allow for perfect saturation and rendering the juiciness of the energy of guitars or screaming vocals. The speed of the signal rise was very good, but paper and rock or electronic music tirades unfortunately do not go hand in hand, because the latter are too sparse in the domain of roundness, juiciness and sonority. And we all know that without a strong depth of energy supported by a slight madness of the upper range, such music simply will not strike us in the good sense of the word, and this is one of the conditions for its good reception. So is this a problem for our heroines? In my opinion, nothing of the sort. You cannot blame a given design for not rising to the heights of presentation quality in a material that it was never really intended for. But so that we understand each other well. This does not mean that you cannot commune with rock outlaws with a “paper style” of playing, because everything will depend on what is playing in someone’s soul. As far as I know, the manufacturer does not have the slightest problem with this, so there is really no problem as such, and the only variable affecting their reception is our taste.
Who would I recommend the Destination Audio Nika speakers to? It is obvious, is it not? Of course, to all fans of lax, but also fast and, in addition, with a taste of nicely applied cellulose sound of their system. Polish loudspeakers do what they do, they do so phenomenally, that I give potential interested parties literally a few bars of music to fall in love with them forever. And what about other freaks? Well, you will never know. Of course, a large group also has a great chance to get “cooked” by them. However, there will certainly also be those who will be completely out of step with the product, that is the source of today’s epistle. But as I mentioned, this will not be the fault of the speakers, but the final aesthetics of the sound, which is the result of premeditated choices made by the designer. Finally, I will only add that, in my opinion, the choices made were very successfully implemented.

Jacek Pazio

Opinion 2

Although the halfway point of May has just passed and we are slowly getting back on track after the Munich marathon, by a strange coincidence as part of today’s meeting we had to face a rather unexpected snapshot from … the past. Do you remember the 2023 Audio Video Show in Warsaw? I assume that, like us, at most so-so; rather on the basis of a general, collective impression and through a slight fog, than with a detailed virtual route and a precise list of visited rooms and systems heard. Meanwhile, out of nowhere, in the spring, almost together with the storks, we received the majestic Destination Audio Nika speakers, taken directly from the exhibition. This made us extremely happy, because despite the fact that in the High-end, which is our main area of interest, the concept of mass production has a decidedly different dimension than in the generally available Hi-Fi segment, i.e. instead of thousands, we talk about tens or hundreds of units at most, the perpetrator of today’s commotion operates on even smaller volumes. It is worth being aware that Destination Audio is in fact a micro-entity of almost boutique character, and thus usually making specific models to individual order. Therefore, since there was an oil-scented pair on the horizon, and the will of the manufacturer to provide it to us, we took the opportunity to find an appropriate place in our listening room to have a listen and share our impressions with you now.

As you can see in the photos above and on the standard teaser in the form of an application-unboxing session, the appearance of Destination Audio Nika is far from the contemporary, generally accepted standards, promoting slender, almost anorexic standards of beauty. Here we can rather talk about truly Rubenesque curves, because the squat shapes of the Polish speakers are undeniably absorbing, both in terms of style and size. However, they have a native beauty sewn into their DNA, identical to solid, timeless furniture, which is chosen not for a season or even years, but for decades. Much of this is due to the beautiful natural veneer and sexy curves that slightly soften the spaciousness of the structure. However, as you can easily guess, the dimensions are not a derivative of the complexes of their creator, but result directly from technical requirements. We are dealing with modular designs, i.e. a large box capable of accommodating a 16″ ALNiCo woofer and a compression tweeter hidden inside a small tube and a midrange horn mounted on it. Fortunately, instead of the standard, „rag” grilles, it was decided to use a string variation, known m.in. from the Sonus Faber speakers, so although the protection of the drivers can be safely considered purely illusory, the degradation of the sound through the above-mentioned accessory is almost negligible, and at the same time the „large-caliber” outlet of the bass-reflex channel located on the front does not breathe straight into our face and does not tempt the underage progeny to verify the possibility of feeding it with a toy, or God forbid, a sandwich or a banana. Both due to the roundness of the bodies, and probably for purely practical reasons, the speaker terminals will not be found „on the back”, but on the inner side walls, and thus we can confidently talk about the left and right speaker.
On the electrical side, we are dealing with three-way designs with an sensitivity of 99 dB and an impedance of 8 or 16 Ω, depending on the expectations of the recipient.

Moving on to the part devoted to the sound of our guests, I am once again tempted to reach for the famous sentence „Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate” from Dante Alighieri’s „Divine Comedy” not so much as a precaution, but as a subliminal warning. There is no denying that the Destination Audio Nika sound in an aesthetic so different from modern standards, that it takes a long time to get used to this signature and only then start wondering whether we like what we hear or if it does not necessarily meets our expectations. To put it bluntly, we get something like the sound for which „pilgrimages” go to Munich every year to taste the specialties served by the Silbatone team from restored, usually cinematic, and over a hundred years old, tube speakers like the Western Electric 16A from 1928.
And just for the sake of clarification, I would like to mention that we conducted the auditions both with our working in class A Gryphon Apex, outputting 200W, and with the GM70 amplification waiting for its proverbial 5 minutes. Thanks to this, we were able to verify that although both the solid-state and the tube are able to get along with those speakers, in the long run they are more comfortable with vacuum tubes. Maybe you lose some control and dynamics, but the equivalent in the form of tangibility and organicity of the sound usually turns out to be fully satisfactory. However, to be clear – the aforementioned organicity should be looked at not through the prism of caramel stickiness and shiny icing, but through the texture of the „paper”, the signature of which is not subject to discussion even for a moment. Therefore, orthodox acolytes of both all kinds of hard membranes and polypropylene derivatives are asked to be a little more open than usual, and the other, much less disgusted, recipients can approach the subject without much prejudice. There is a certain undeniable old-school or even vintage style in the sound of Nika, but at the same time this apparent anachronism cannot be denied charm and nostalgic beauty. This is clearly the same as the aesthetics of Michael Bublé’s and Melody Gardot’s recordings, or the slightly harsher climates, thanks to which Greta Van Fleet turned the musical table, where we are supposedly dealing with an undeniably modern performer, and at the same time we evidently, thanks to a magic vehicle, commune with sounds that have been transferred to our times from the 50s or 70s of the past era. There is a strong, forward-fed midrange, a truly concert-like, proper bass, which you expect when looking at the size of the woofer, and a treble that complements the whole, which focuses mainly on communicativeness and only then at any audiophile refinement. And it is not about its offensiveness, but only about maintaining aesthetic consistency with the rest of the band reproduced by the tested speakers. That is why Greta Van Fleet’s distorted guitars sound so feisty and, contrary to appearances, authentic. In addition, on the level of authenticity and spontaneity of Led Zeppelin – with „crunchy” drums, where we have a hit and an attack, but at the same time no one expects a bass drum venturing into the deepest recesses of Hades. It is hard, with slight dryness, but at the same time the sound has extraordinary freedom and immediacy. And that is how it should sound, so there is no need to punch a hole in the whole thing. And if it is supposed to be denser and „nicer”, it is enough to go back to Bublé and Gardot, where both the orchestration and the vocal layer will take us back to the times when milk arrived at the door in glass bottles and it could be made „sour”; when in the (black and white) TV there was initially only one channel (2nd channel appeared only on October 2, 1970 in Poland), and only three channels on the radio (Radio Three was launched on 1 April 1962). Are we dealing with constructions modelled on the contemporary competition that is good all around? Well, I would not be so optimistic, because from the music genres that I would not necessarily get along with, I would mention heavy electronics in the style of Murkury, SIERRA, or Infected Mushroom, as well as extreme types of metal represented by our Polish Behemoth or Slayer. It seems that you can listen to the above repertoire if you are stubborn, but I must admit that it is a torture for the speakers themselves and for the listener, and I dare say that this is not necessarily what this game is about.

Nevertheless, it should be considered that the Destination Audio Nika loudspeakers are aimed not at a random recipient, but music lovers and audiophiles, perfectly able to define their own expectations, and at the same time exploring more civilized manifestations of musical creativity, more talented representatives of homo sapiens than the exceptions indicated in the previous paragraph. So if you show the above tendencies, with tubes on your way, and you also have at least a 25-meter listening room for listening, then … If only out of pure curiosity, take a look and listen to the tested speakers.

Marcin Olszewski

System used in this test:
Source:
– CD Player/DAC: Gryphon Ethos
– streamer: Lumin U2 Mini + switch Quantum Science Audio (QSA) Red-Silver
– Preamplifier: Gryphon Audio Pandora
– Power amplifier: Gryphon Audio Apex Stereo
– Loudspeakers: Gauder Akustik Berlina RC-11 Black Edition
– Speaker cables: Furutech Nanoflux-NCF Speaker Cable
IC RCA: Hijiri Million „Kiwami”, Vermouth Audio Reference
IC XLR: Tellurium Q Silver Diamond, Hijiri Milion „Kiwami”, Furutech DAS-4.1
Digital IC: Hijiri HDG-X Milion
Ethernet cable: NxLT LAN FLAME
USB cable: ZenSati Silenzio
Power cables: Hijiri Takumi Maestro, Furutech Project-V1, Furutech NanoFlux NCF, Furutech DPS-4.1 + FI-E50 NCF(R)/ FI-50(R), Hijiri Nagomi, Vermouth Audio Reference Power Cord, Acrolink 8N-PC8100 Performante, Synergistic Research Galileo SX AC
– Table: BASE AUDIO 2
Accessories: Quantum Science Audio Red fuse; QSA Silver fuse; Synergistic Research Orange fuse; antivibration platform by SOLID TECH; Harmonix AC Enacom Improved for 100-240V
– Power distribution board: POWER BASE HIGH END, Furutech NCF Power Vault-E
– Acoustic treatments by Artnovion
Analog stage:
– Drive: Clearaudio Concept
– Cartridge: Dynavector DV20X2H
– Phonostage: Sensor 2 mk II
– Eccentricity Detection Stabilizer: DS Audio ES-001
– Tape recorder: Studer A80

Distributor/Manufacturer: Destination Audio
Price: 55 500 €

Specifications
Frequency response: 25 – 20.000 Hz
Power capacity: 20 W
Sensitivity (1 W/ 1 m): 99 dB
Nominal Impedance: 8 or 16 Ω
Recommended minimum room size: 20 m²
Dimensions (W x H x D): 64 x 125 x 64 cm
Weight: 115 kg