This has to be one of the most unusual loudspeakers to come my way in nearly twenty years of reviewing, not only is it an extreme product but it comes from a company which I had perceived as being more conservative than most. It just shows how wrong you can be and how pretty well every Japanese audio brand, however mass market, harbours at least a few hi-fi nuts.
The D-TK10 also carries the badge Takamine which is the name of a Japanese acoustic guitar maker. This is because the speaker was developed in co-operation with this company and has a cabinet that is rather closer to that of a guitar than most loudspeakers. Some years back a bright spark in the Onkyo product planning department came up with the idea of making a loudspeaker that was like a musical instrument. A novel approach and one that runs against pretty much all conventional thinking on loudspeaker design, which is that the cabinet should be as inert as possible and contribute nothing to the eventual sound. However, the cabinet is a major source of colouration in many more affordable speakers, the bigger they are the worse it is. So Onkyo's decision to try and use this energy in a positive way is a radical step to say the least.
You only have to pick up these speakers and tap them to realise just how thin the wood is. Not surprisingly they have a resonant character that's almost identical to an acoustic guitar. But arriving at this hybrid proved a challenging task that took over two years to finalise, a process that involved a great deal of experimentation with the materials and positioning of internal bracing.
There's more to the D-TK10 than a thin-walled box on a rosewood plinth, there are also two pretty radical drivers. The tweeter is a ring radiator type with a claimed high frequency extension up to 100kHz while the 8cm coned mid/bass unit uses Onkyo's advanced micro fibre (A-OMF) material. This forms a one-piece cone and dustcap using three materials, an external layer of woven polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) an inner layer of aramid and a flexible cotton weave between the two. The idea apparently is to achieve great stiffness without too much weight.
As a system this speaker is unusually inefficient, its 80dB/1w sensitivity at 4 ohms being a fundamental limit to the overall loudness potential. It also suggests that despite the speaker's diminutive size the partnering amplifier will have to be of the large and current-strong variety.
Performance
I put the Onkyos on the tallest stands I had and they still looked tiny but size can be deceptive. So the listening commenced and to begin with things were highly engaging and entertaining, albeit in a slightly more reverberant fashion than usual. However it became apparent that the speaker was struggling to fill the larger than average room I was using. This was only really obvious with female vocals at highish levels but still, it couldn't be ignored.
Having shifted them into a more conventional (12ftx15ft) room and hooked up Sugden's A21SE, a class A amplifier with only 21 watts but plenty of current on tap, the result could accurately be described as sweet. That pointy tweeter is uncannily fine and smooth. In fact, it's so relaxed and calm compared to regular domes that you begin to think that the treble is smoothed off, yet when genuinely high notes come along they sparkle as intended.
The character of the box makes itself heard in the apparently increased resolve of instrumental and vocal timbre, but whether you are hearing the timbre of the voice in question or that of the cabinet is open to debate. Something is not surprisingly being added to the mix and the result is therefore coloured tonally, so accuracy is not what the Onkyo is all about.
Where it scores is in musicality and engagement – the music flows so easily that you carry on listening way longer than you had planned. This is partly because those drive units do such a good job of minimising distortion and making the most of both dynamics and timing cues. You wouldn't expect such an inefficient design to do dynamics but, thanks possibly to the cabinet construction, this is exactly what they do, both invigorating and enlivening the music.
Inevitably, deep bass is not on the agenda. The specs quote 50hz and even that seems optimistic but neither are they lightweights – put them about 40cm from the wall and they produce enough low end to let you know what's going on down there even if they are unlikely to ever actually aggravate neighbours. Imaging is usually a plus point with small speakers and these do a reasonable if rather imprecise job of recreating the sense of a musician in the room. Regular loudspeakers of the same size such as Dali's Royal Menuet II do this a lot better but they don't have the high frequency naturalness on offer here and sound a shade hard by comparison.
The Onkyo will not compete with bigger speakers at its price point but if you want something small that's both revealing and entertaining it's very tempting, and extremely cool.
Conclusion
The Onkyo D-TK10 is a brave and entertaining little speaker that is sure to find its niche among connoisseurs of high-end compact designs. It's never going to be an all-rounder but put it with a refined amplifier and you have a recipe for thoroughly engaging music in smaller rooms. In fact they'd work beautifully with, for example, Russ Andrews' HP-1/PA-1 pre/power combo or indeed Onkyo's new DR-815 micro CD/universal DVD receiver as a state-of-the-art desktop system.
Specifications
Price: £1,999
More info: Onkyo
Size (WxHxD): 133x276x220mm
Weight: 2.9kg
Main driver: 10cm A-OMF monocoque, magnetically shielded
Tweeter: 3cm Ring-drive
Finish: Mahogany/rosewood
Plus points: Vibrant and effusive sound from a box that is compact and attractive with some very high tech drive units
Minus points: Limited loudness capability due to low sensitivity and inevitably limited bass extension because of its small size
