Review of the TIDAL Piano Diacera in the German audio magazine "hifi & records", issue # 1 / 2011:

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"Just another speaker with diamond and ceramic drivers? Most certainly not, because no other speaker is as uncompromising as the Piano Diacera... "Uncompromising", one of those empty phrases dear to the hifi press you believe? Hold on, let's wait and see. In recent years, a number of standards have been established in circles of ambitious loudspeaker builders. With a fair degree of certainty, one has come to expect Mundorf components, Accuton drivers and curved cabinets. Unquestionably, there are exemptions, but one in three premium grade speakers satisfies that description these days.

In the past years, I had the opportunity to become closely acquaintanced with a few Accuton equipped speakers: Ayon Goshawk, Consensus Audio Lightning and Isophon.
Surely, all of them fine speakers, among which the Isopon sporting a diamond tweeter appealed most to me, by a considerable margin. I believe all of them have been developed with the specific goal to overcome flaws inherent to other materials such as polypropylene, paper, aluminium or silk.
With a clear commitment to progress in technology, these speakers manage to blend into the manufacturer's product range in so far as they are still "kind of payable", provided one is prepared to tag this to the price of a small car.
The Piano Diacera is a different case. Here, the task at hand was to "shrink" a world class speaker - tall as a full grown man and exceeding the 100.000 € mark - in size, so as to make it fit in listening rooms measuring between 20m² and 40m². "I wanted a Sunray in a smaller enclosure" says Jörn Janczak. Now, what is a Sunray? And who is Jörn Janczak?

Picture an enterprise park near Cologne with film and television studios. On the other side of the road a multipurpose building. Jörn Janczak takes me on a tour through Tidal Audio, his company launched in 1999, and recounts with obvious delight: "The beginning was cumbersome but nowadays we have our feet firmly on the ground." And it would very much appear they're on a roll indeed.
Euphoric accounts by visitors of CES in Las Vegas and RMAF in Denver have motivated me to reach for the telephone and invite myself to the company, so to speak. Here we have a German manufacturer who demonstrably scores a success with his loudspeakers in America, Israel Russia, Hongkong, … only in the domestic hifi press only few people seems to know about Tidal. Janczak completely indulges in his dream of creating the perfect speaker. Nothing embodies that passion as much as the Sunray does.
I take a seat in the demonstration room and simply hear music. The most amazing thing is the homogeneity of the Sunray's performance devoid of even the slightest trace of strain.
My listening distance was something of three and a half meters and yet these towers, each of them consisting of two bass modules with a further high/mid tone module in between those, were acoustically inseparable. It sounded like the perfect two-way monitor, only without any trace of compression and with substantial and deep bass that, on the other hand, leapt from the speakers fast and as light as a feather.

From that moment on, it was absolutely clear that Tidal is about something else than merely polishing piano lacquer, namely to build the finest speaker systems in the world, and Janczak is perfectly serious about his quest. And, he's not just talking big, indeed I wonder whether he's not reached that supreme goal already with the Sunray.
With the exception of Acapella's Sphäron Excalibur I know nothing at all that comes even near the Sunray. So sad "my" Sunray performs in Indonesia, meanwhile, and not in my living room where it belongs, really. Oh well, since a few weeks that living room is home to the Piano Diacera.
To describe it in surely overly simplified terms, the speaker looks like the high/mid tone module of the Sunray enlarged to give birth to a floorstanding loudspeaker.





So, we have a diamond tweeter and two ceramic mid/bass drivers plus two cabinets - given its price tag, a number of readers may want to put a big question mark next to that. However, it is simply unjustified to compare the Piano Diacera to the mentioned speakers considering the enormous expenditure for components in the former.
Certainly, the Accuton tweeters with their 20 mm radius used in the Isophon are already very expensive; but then the 30 mm version, a proprietary design custom made in 2003 for Tidal and first deployed in the Sunray and now also used in the Piano Diacera, is just short of unpayable.

Janczak, in his designs painstakingly committed to microphone measurements, knows of course that diamond is the nearest thing to the ideal of limitlessly stiff material but also that it does not reach the straight as a ruler frequency response of a ceramic tweeter.
Yet, in this case he follows the truth his ears tell him. "This 30mm diamond simply comes nearer to the original and, to me, with a perfectly adjusted cross-over topology it is the only tweeter one cannot separate out anymore." But the uncompromising expenditure does not end here. Take the crossover for example which features silver carbon resistors, an inductor weighing almost 10 kg with moulded capacitors consisting of massive copper foil and oil impregnated paper as dielectric.
Most of these parts are made by Duelund from Denmark. In serial speaker production one will never ever find any of those. You see, inductors and capacitors costing several hundreds of Euro hardly fit into that sort of budget.





The speaker cable terminal on the rear enables hook-up in three different operating modes: either in true 2 way mode, or with the second mid/bass driver in 2,5 way configuration in linear mode, or in that same configuration with slightly enhanced bass gain. In my room, the latter variant sounded best. One doesn't loose anything noteworthy in terms of imaging whereas on the other hand there is noticeably increased substance.
Another particular point to mention is that on top of its really high grade isolator feet, Tidal supply a Leica laser distance meter with the Piano Diacera - a broad hint that one should put some effort into appropriately adjusting the speakers' toe-in, an indispensable and worthwhile procedure with an acoustic lens of this format. Therefore, never try to judge the Piano Diacera within the first quarter of an hour.

I shall start my appraisal with just one point to deduct: should you be looking for abysmal bass, look further. It quite simply lacks driver membrane for that; somewhere between 35 and 40 Hz, the frequency response starts sloping. Then again, one who does not listen to organ music by Vierne or Widor all the time, will be perfectly able to live with that. Orchestral instruments such as the contrabass are rendered in their full extensiveness; I for my part didn't miss anything at all.
And so we come to the merits and the first thing I would like to say is: it left me speechless. In fact, one cannot grasp the "sound" of the Piano Diacera, let alone try to describe it. Any specific praise - dynamic performance, colourful expression, lifelike stage - would miss the point because any such accolade - which highlights only one quality - risks to be misunderstood as a critique in that the loudspeaker might seem to "interpret" music in that it accentuates that particular aspect of the music.

This speaker does not do that at all. Instead, it is the perfect reproducer, communicator, message carrier: whatever is fed into the speaker is projected 1:1 into the listening room. How can I be so sure of that? Because there is evidence. Never before did a speaker make the differences between other components so utterly clear; some components were downright unable to cope with the accuracy, they were just unable to fill the finely resolved picture with the appropriate level of information.
As if someone was attempting to fill a cinema screen with a super 8 projector. The Piano Diacera demands highest quality sources. Also, it had been a very long time since I had last been struck to a comparable extent by the phenomenon whereby a better component makes you discover anew your own collection of vinyl and CDs and reveals details you never heard before.

No approximation or levelling between recordings or components on account of the speaker's own "character" here. As a matter of fact, the speaker doesn't have a character - unless it is defined by its truthfulness, richness of detail and homogeneity, that is. No "hifi" to muddle the interface between the music and the listener; the music hits you purely and directly.
Often that also means it will unfold and flow unspectacularly.
With some well-known recordings, one may initially even be under the impression that they sound more "lacklustre" than before, until one suddenly realises that the previously heard "sparkle" of an instrument such as the clarinet was actually an artefact of an inaccurate rendition.
With that insight gained (reflecting back on the last concert one attended helps tremendously to that end), one will never want to step back from the purity that the Piano Diacera has to offer anymore, quite simply because its natural sound is so much more beautiful than anything hifi is ever able to make of it.

Conclusion After the experience at Tidal Audio and the Piano Diacera's sojourn in my living room, I can only congratulate Jörn Janczak.
I have never heard any speaker that reproduces music any more clean, homogeneous, intact or open than the Sunray - this is under each and every aspect an uncompromising component that also invites and enables the listener to learn.
What about the Piano Diacera, then? Truly, it should be compared with nothing else but its illustrious next of kin. If the rest of the system is up to the task, the Piano Diacera projects any recording session completely unfettered into the listening room. Unquestionably, an exceptional speaker."

reviewed by Heinz Gelking, hifi & records 1/2011