Gold Note Diana I and Diana II are unusually looking, fabric-clad bookshelf loudspeakers handmade in Italy. Why do speakers go ‘undercover’ and what technology Gold Note fits inside?
Diana is the name for a new ‘modular’ speaker series with upgrade path built-in. The base modules are Diana I and II bookshelves and the add-ons are a passive subwoofer-cum-stand to turn the compact speaker into a slim floorstander, and a centre channel to add if a multichannel system is needed. All that seems to be pretty much the definition of modular, but the Gold Note innovation are in the design of Diana speakers.
Tightly clad in an acoustically transparent fabric made of 90% recycled materials the Diana I and Diana II cabinets look very unusual. And it’s not only the fabric: conic shaped protrusions sort of bulge from side panels closer to the speaker front, and an opening on the front panel reveals a dome tweeter behind a steel protective mesh. If you take a peek in the back though, there is no cloth cover and rather ordinarily looking round bass reflex port and input terminals sit there like in a regular speaker.
Diana I is a smallish two-way with 25mm (1 inch) silk dome tweeter and 165mm (6½ inch) glass-fibre cone woofer. Diana II is significantly taller since it adds a second woofer in the vertical W-T-W arrangement and those woofers use treated paper membranes.
The conic shaped protrusions are positioned at side panels along the woofer, so there is four of them in Diana II and two in Diana I. These are mechanically tuned resonator devices developed by Gold Note to cancel out unwanted vibrations which appear due to strong forces generated by moving parts of any woofer.
