While the drive units are the heart of a loudspeaker system, they would be nothing without the integration of a precisely derived crossover. Wharfedale’s engineers use a highly evolved virtual crossover software system to help create a series of circuit options for combining the bass/midrange and treble units seamlessly. These circuit options are then evaluated using stringent listening tests over a period of months, involving a wide range of music.

Once the final circuit strategy has been chosen, the design team fine tunes the crossover component values, the type of components and the circuit board layout to yield the most accurate, detailed and, above all, enjoyable musical performance using only listening tests as an arbiter of quality.

Special attention is paid to the lifelike qualities of vocals and natural instruments, as these are always the focus of listeners’ subjective appraisal of a loudspeaker’s performance. It is this attention to fine tuning, allied to excellent technical design, that gives Wharfedale Diamond speakers their enduring appeal in the affordable sector of the hi-fi market, from one generation to the next.

Cabinet construction

While the cabinet, to the owner, is often just a piece of furniture, Wharfedale has long realised that it is the final piece of the design process that marks a speaker out of the ordinary. Since the early days of Wharfedale, when the founder, Gilbert Briggs, was experimenting with such rarities as sand-filled baffles, cabinet construction has always been part and parcel of the ‘sound’ of Wharfedale speakers.

For the Diamond 11 Series, Wharfedale’s engineers have refined the multi-layer sandwich of woods of differing density to subdue the identifiable characteristics of the cabinet ‘sound’ and so let the drive units speak for themselves. Critical bracing of the cabinet panels, together with the curving of the cabinet walls to provide a non-boxy shape, have reduced resonances more than 25dB below the driver outputs. In addition, the cabinet walls are lined with a specially developed internal fibre which has been chosen because of its outstanding absorbent qualities across a wide bandwidth.

The result is that the listener hears the drive unit output unsullied by unwanted colorations caused by panel vibration or internal resonances, revealing more of the detail of the musical performance.
 

Slot-loaded distributed port

The slot-loaded distributed port is a recent Diamond innovation, first introduced in the Diamond 100 Series in 2012, where the internal port tube opens into a slot formed between the cabinet and the plinth. This reduces the turbulence and audible ‘chuffing’ suffered by conventional ported systems, which is caused by the sudden outrush of high pressure air into the low pressure in the room. A further benefit is to increase the efficiency of energy transfer from the bass reflex tuning to the room.

Wharfedale has taken this one stage further for the Diamond 11 Series, profiling both ends of the port with a semi-parabolic entry and exit curve that linearises airflow through the port tube. This has allowed us to increase the volume of air in the slot-loaded system and further improve the performance of the low frequency output.