öbel High End has been in business for twenty years and its line of Divin loudspeakers has been winning accolades from the audio press since their introduction in 2017. But the Divin loudspeakers are only part of the Göbel story; the company also designs and manufactures the Epoque Aeon line of bending-wave loudspeakers and the Lacorde Statement line of cables. The Divin loudspeakers come in three sizes, or, one might say, three super sizes, as none is either small in size or light in weight. The first, in 2017, was the Divin Majestic ($549,000 per pair), which, in today's incarnation, is a 7 1/2' tall structure weighing in at 1168 pounds. This was followed in 2018 by the mid-sized Divin Noblesse ($235,000 per pair), at 5 1/2' tall and 573 pounds, with the "baby" Divin Marquis ($89,000 per pair) coming in 2020, at nearly four feet tall and 330 pounds. The Divin Sovereign subwoofer ($30,000 each) completed the range in 2022.
Several years ago, Göbel broke ground on a new factory in Landshut, Germany, a short drive from Munich. During last year's 2022 Munich High End Show, the factory was opened to the press for an evening. At the time, the facility was a shell of a building and far from complete. This year, with the facility up and running, the press trekked out to the factory for a visit during the 2023 High End Show, but I (along with Roy Gregory and Stirling Trayle of Audio Systems Optimized) decided to get an up-close and more deliberate look by visiting after the show was over and most press and other visitors were leaving town.
Göbel had shown its Divin Marquis and Divin Sovereign at the High End show, but I looked forward to visiting the factory, where two listening rooms accommodated the two largest Divin speakers. The newly completed factory is set in a small industrial park outside Landshut, which has a historic town center, a castle, and a medieval church. But the industrial park is all twenty-first-century modern, with new structures rising around Göbel's sleek new building.
Once you enter Göbel's front door, all is quiet and sealed off from the surrounding development. Office space and a meeting room usher you into a hallway opening to two large listening rooms. The smaller of the two rooms is quite large, at about 540 square feet, with 12' ceilings.
The system in that room is built around Göbel's Divin Noblesse speakers and Divin Sovereign subwoofers, powered by Riviera Audio Laboratories AFM100SE mono amplifiers and a Riviera APL01SE preamp. The front-end is a CH Precision D1.5 transport, a CH Precision C1.2 DAC with streaming bridge, a CH Precision X1 external power supply and a MUTEC REF10 SE120 external clock. Connections are all made with Göbel's Lacorde Statement cabling. The high-sensitivity Noblesse speakers match well with the relatively low-power (100 watts per side) Italian electronics, reinforcing my impression that Göbel makes some of the best-sounding speakers available today.
Across the hall from the Noblesse system was Göbel's larger room featuring Divin Majestic speakers powered by CH Precision M10 amplifiers and an L10 preamplifier, with a front-end courtesy of Wadax. Anyone who has ever seen any of these products knows how large each piece of equipment is. Yet the photographs of the room create almost an optical illusion, because the room is massive -- 1200 square feet of space with a 12' ceiling. The Majestics would scrape the ceiling in most listening rooms. The CH Precision M10 amplifiers are huge and everything in the Wadax line is of back-breaking proportions, but in this room the 7 1/2' tall speakers and the four-box amplifiers seem almost petite.
As with the smaller room, the side-wall treatments were custom designed and manufactured by local companies, combining wood and concrete or resin-composite units, with hanging ceiling absorbers/reflectors. Top-of-the-line Wadax digital gear provided the music. The system generally includes a full Kronos Discovery turntable, but it had been used at the High End Show and there had not been enough time to uncrate and reinstall it in the listening room prior to our visit, so we had to "make do" with the Wadax server.
The system was completely connected with Göbel's Lacorde Statement cables and supported with amp stands and racks from FalkenOhr. We had brought along several discs that were downloaded to the Wadax server, and the sound was magnificent. Nothing at the High End show came close, and the big room produced sound that easily ranks among the best I've heard. The stability and authenticity were stunning. This is a very expensive room built to ambitious standards filled with equipment that only the deepest pockets could afford. High cost does not always translate to great sound, but this room and system delivered breathtaking music.
The factory itself was closed on the day of our visit, as the staff (other than Oliver Göbel and his wife, Carolin) had worked at the show and had the day off. Other than the two principals, there are only three other employees. The fabrication of the enclosures, milling and turning of the metal parts and painting of the units are done off premises with local independent contractors, leaving Oliver and his staff to do the development, design, 3D CAD-construction, selection of components, extensive quality control, vacuum impregnation, molding, assembly, testing and shipping onsite. These operations do not require some of the things typically associated with a factory, such as assembly lines and giant, noisy equipment. What is required are beautifully finished, hard-concrete floors, plenty of light and space for moving things about on electric forklifts and industrial rolling carts.
Workstations are set up along a bay of large windows, provisioned with the obligatory oscilloscopes, Apple computers and other tools.
The walls are lined with industrial racks, filled with plastic bins and cardboard boxes filled with supplies and parts. Of course, power outlets need to be everywhere, and the walls are lined with them. Further into the rooms, there are hanging compressed air and power distributors.
The storage areas and shipping department are filled with pallet racks for the giant flight cases used to transport the speakers. The smaller speakers fit in single flight case, but each Divin Majestic requires three. The design of the cases is ingenious, with the top section breaking down to two pieces, the larger piece of which folds back, allowing the speaker to roll out without requiring the setup person to lift the top up and over the exceptionally large speaker.
The most fascinating part of the factory, however, is the in-house anechoic chamber. Prior to opening this new facility, Göbel used an anechoic room at a local university with a large technology department for all its design needs. The Landshut factory, however, has its own dedicated chamber that allows Oliver and his staff to perform most of their testing onsite. Speakers are rolled into the room on an electric forklift, which is then used to raise the speakers to the correct height.
In addition to testing complete speaker units (each loudspeaker which is leaving the factory is fine tuned in this room), the room can be used to test and adjust individual components on the fly. If you are checking, for example, for the correct capacitor or other components, the speaker is wired so that cables run from the part's location, through a hole in the wall to the next room, where a technician can wire in and test various values. All in all, Oliver Göbel has created an impressive
factory and showroom for his equally impressive products. |
