Note: measurements taken in the anechoic chamber at Canada’s National Research Council can be found through this link.
As I’ve said on any number of occasions lately, my barometer for value has become completely uncalibrated. Every trip to the grocery store involves sticker shock. Homeowners’ insurance deductibles have climbed so high that I may as well not have said insurance, if not for the fact that total devastation is becoming increasingly likely due to an increasingly angry climate. Panera Bread—long my favorite cheap fast-food restaurant—now seems like a bougie indulgence.
And do I even need to mention what’s going on with the price of hi‑fi gear in the United States? I mean, of course I do. That’s what I’m here to write about. I’m merely giving you a bit of background to explain my initial reactions to DALI’s new Kupid bookshelf speaker (US$600, CA$600, £299, €338 per pair, as of early December 2025).
As I mentioned in my unboxing blog post for the Kupid, the last DALI speaker I reviewed was actually my very first review for SoundStage! Access. It was a 5.1-channel system based on the company’s Oberon 1 bookshelf, which retailed for $599/pair in 2020 and sells for $750 now. As such, I sort of relied on that as my yardstick by which to set my expectations for the new Kupid, although I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my political biases got baked into those expectations as well.
By that I mean that I’m so used to seeing the working class get screwed so much harder than the ruling class, and I expect to see affordable gear get less affordable at a much more rapid clip than luxury gear. So I didn’t look at the Kupid’s price—80 percent of the MSRP of the Oberon 1—and expect to get 80 percent as much speaker. Not in 2025 going on 2026. I assumed some corners would be cut, that aesthetics would suffer to a degree, that materials and fit-and-finish would take a hit. Not that there’s much validity in such mental math, but for 80 percent of the MSRP, I expected to get 60 percent as much speaker.
Unboxing my Kupid review samples disabused me of that notion really quickly, at least in terms of the build quality, attention to detail, fit and finish, and overall aesthetic design. I thought the Oberon 1 was a gorgeous little speaker and still do, but the Kupid is, in every meaningful sense, better looking, better appointed, and better built. It also comes in your choice of five gorgeous finishes—Golden Yellow vinyl, Caramel White, Black Ash, Chilly Blue, and Dark Walnut vinyl—and the woofer is dyed to match the cabinet in each case. What’s more, the more colorful finishes come with a custom-tinted, magnetically affixed grille.
So what gives? I’m not inclined to think it’s pure fidelity, because DALI knows how to design a good two-way ported speaker, and there’s not a lot the company could screw up here. The Kupid features smaller drivers than the Oberon 1, mind you—a 4.5″ paper-and-wood-fiber woofer instead of the Oberon 1’s 5.25″ cone, and a 26mm soft-dome tweeter instead of 29mm. It also comes in a smaller cabinet: 9.6″H × 5.9″W × 7.8″D, versus 10.8″H × 8.4″W × 9.2″D for the Oberon 1. Plus it weighs significantly less at 6.4 versus 9.2 pounds. Partly as a result, it’s not quite as sensitive at 83dB, its bass extension is specified at 63Hz as opposed to 51Hz, it’s a nominal 4-ohm load instead of nominally 6 ohms, and max SPLs at one meter come in at 103dB versus 106dB.
So, long and short, the Kupid is probably better suited to a smaller room and is more likely to benefit from a subwoofer, depending on your taste in music. But looking at its design, its driver configuration, and DALI’s published specifications, I’m not seeing anything to indicate any red flags. So what gives? There’s really only one way to find out.
Setting up and dialing in the DALI Kupid
Another thing worth considering about the Kupid is DALI’s placement and positioning recommendations. The company suggests in its incredibly educational instruction manual that the cabinet can be placed within one inch of the wall without affecting airflow or output of the dual-flare rear-firing port. It also comes with mounting hardware packed in the box. DALI also recommends firing the speaker directly out into the room, perpendicular to the wall, with no toe-in.
The wall-clinging placement didn’t really work in my main two-channel room, so I suspected I’d have to test the speakers out briefly and then move them into my bedroom, flanking the wall-mounted TV, but it turned out that placement approximately 13″ from the wall still gave me good usable bass extension below 80Hz, and as such, I stuck to my normal testing environment. If you’re running a pair without a sub, you might need more boundary reinforcement, though.
As for the lack of toe-in, I tried it DALI’s way and felt that a slight bit of toe-in resulted in a better balance of soundstage and imaging, which I’ll dig into deeper down below in the performance section.
For the duration of my review, I relied on my reference NAD C 3050 integrated amplifier with no room correction, and when I employed a subwoofer, it was my SVS PB‑1000 Pro. Speaker cables were SVS SoundPath Ultra pre-terminated with banana plugs, and sources comprised mostly Qobuz (running in Bottles) and BluOS (running via a scripted repackage designed to run on Linux, as well as via my iPhone).
How does the Kupid perform?
I think most audio writers have a tendency to gravitate toward the best-sounding recordings as reference material in reviews, if only to avoid criticism. But that’s not always the most illuminating approach. I much prefer using recordings that consistently and undeniably tell me something about the performance of a piece of gear.
A prime example “Christmas Morning” from Lyle Lovett’s The Road to Ensenada (16‑bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Curb Records / Qobuz). The vocals aren’t particularly well-mixed here. Lovett’s voice is a little sibilant, a little too present. So if I feed a new pair of speakers this song and my immediate impression isn’t that it’s a little too edgy, a bit brittle, that makes me suspect that speaker has some anomalies I need to be on the lookout for.
Listening to “Christmas Morning” on the Kupid speakers, I heard precisely the expected amount of edginess, pointing toward overall tonal accuracy, especially at the higher end of the vocal range. But the overall tonality of the vocals was actually a bit more authentic than I’m used to hearing with my reference Paradigm Studio 100s. By that I mean that Lyle’s voice sounded slightly less congested. More effortless. The Kupids really captured the close-miked intimacy beautifully and delivered exceptional detail, but not due to overemphasis on any particular frequency—at least not as far as I could hear. Measurements might contradict me. But my overall initial impression was that these speakers simply got out of the way of the music.
Of course, those were merely first impressions. Think of it as me wetting my finger and sticking it into the wind. And the way the wind was blowing made me feel like I needed to cue up something next with very well-mixed vocals—namely, “Homemade Dynamite” by Lorde from her 2017 album Melodrama (16/44.1 FLAC, Universal Music New Zealand Limited / Qobuz). Here, the Kupids’ prowess with the most critical midrange frequencies was even more impressive. Again, I found them to be overall more natural and neutral than my Paradigms, which was somewhat disconcerting. Detail was exceptional, and the word I see repeated again and again in my stream-of-consciousness listening notes is “authenticity.” The Kupids took this song and delivered some truly and wonderfully natural timbres in addition to their delightfully neutral tonality. The speakers also shone a light on the distinctive mixing differences between the song’s chorus and verses.
If you’re looking for a reason to dock the Kupid a few points, when I turned off my sub and simply listened to the speakers attempting to run full-range, I could hear the woofers compressing a little. Would most people notice? I’m not sure, but I’m inclined to say no. Attentive listeners engaged in dedicated and undistracted listening would pick up on it, though. Even a crossover point of 80Hz took such a load off the Kupids’ woofers as to make this a non-issue, and enhanced linearity substantially. What’s more, the reverb-drenched decay of Lorde’s final line just wafted out into the room with such an incredible sense of space that I couldn’t help thinking the speakers must be well-matched, with exceptional dispersion.
I say that because the common denominator between the presentation of “Homemade Dynamite” and “Christmas Morning” was excellent soundstage width and depth. What I felt might be missing a little—at least as compared with my much pricier and much larger Paradigm towers—was the nth degree of image specificity.
With “Welcome to the Machine” from Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here (24/192 FLAC, Pink Floyd Records / Qobuz), the mechanical noises in the intro that whoosh across the soundstage did get a little fuzzy as they passed through the phantom center, which—to be fair—is a tough test. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I turned to it as a test in this case. The Kupids simply performed so well in other respects that I felt compelled to hunt for the things they couldn’t do as well as truly world-class speakers, taking into account the limitations of driver size, cabinet design, etc. I’m frankly impressed that they handled the imaging of this track as well as they did.
So what might be the cause of this? I’m not sure, and I look forward to seeing the measurements once we get the speakers back from the NRC. I’d be inclined to guess that it might be some wobbly response in the frequency range to which our ears are most sensitive—maybe 3kHz-ish in this case—but if that’s true, I’m not hearing it in my subjective listening. I’m also not inclined to chalk it up to a crossover issue. So I’m stumped. But in truth, I’m making a big deal over a very minor issue here. I’m simply trying to illustrate that, aside from issues like the overall scale and impact, not to mention sensitivity, this is where you have to go hunting to find the limitations imposed by the price of these speakers.
On the flipside, the Kupids did things well that I hadn’t expected them to. I indicated above that an 80Hz crossover relieved some stress and strain from their midrange-woofers. But that wasn’t intended as an indication that these little satellites summed perfectly with my SVS sub. My similarly sized RSL CG3 bookshelf speakers, for example, benefit from an 80Hz crossover in terms of taking some stress off their woofers, but don’t really blend seamlessly with a sub at that point. At least not with a lot of help from Dirac Live Bass Control, which I did not employ here.
To dial in the subwoofer integration by ear, I turned my attention to “Bittersweet” by Lianne La Havas (Lianne La Havas, 24/44.1 FLAC, Warner Records / Qobuz), which I frequently use as both a rattle test for subs and an indicator of how well I’ve dialed in my bass management. Long story short, 80Hz still worked, much to my surprise. But in the end, I felt that 90Hz worked better, giving me more seamless integration without any localization issues.
Just for giggles, I switched off the crossover and went back to full-range stereo after turning the volume way down, imagining that I’d be putting the Kupids’ midrange-woofers in peril otherwise. They held up just fine, though, with pretty much the same level of compression I mentioned above, but also a graceful roll-off that didn’t leave me feeling like I was missing anything essential from the mix.
It was a case of not really knowing what you’re missing. The sub adds much to the equation, of course. But even without a sub, these little speakers were wholly satisfying in their delivery of this bass-dominant cut. I had to feed the Kupids frequency sweeps in the 37Hz to 45Hz range (far below the speaker’s rated frequency extension) to hear even the tiniest bit of chuffing, and it was so low relative to the signal that the only reason I’m mentioning it is because of how impressively little port noise there was.
Mind you, those are the things I was specifically listening for in my testing with this track. But they weren’t what grabbed my attention the most. Instead, I was once again drawn in by the authenticity of the vocals, not to mention the delightful soundstage and the overall dispersion characteristics. I had to fully stand up to start challenging the Kupids’ vertical dispersion capabilities. And an ear height of anywhere between woofer-level and maybe 1.5′ above the tweeter worked very well.
Overall, this is a great example of a speaker that’s forgiving in terms of positioning but rewards a bit of extra effort in setup. It sounds brilliant just plopped in a reasonably sensible spot in the room, and although it doesn’t gain a ton from tinkering with toe-in and forward/back positioning, it still returns appreciable rewards for such.
What other speakers might you consider in this class?
My first instinct was to compare the Kupid to the PSB Imagine B50, since that’s probably my favorite bookshelf speaker in this price class I’ve heard recently. Turns out, though, that since I reviewed the B50, its price has gone up from US$699/pair (well within the “if you’re willing to spend a bit more” range) to US$999. So it’s no longer a fair comparison, even if I think that’s still a fair price for a pair of the PSBs, given the nuclear dumpster fire of an economy we’re living in.
Which leaves me leaning hard on the Q Acoustics 3030c ($699 to $799/pair, depending on where you buy them and when), which is the little sibling of the 3050c tower I reviewed and loved a few months back. The Q is a little more laid back in the upper midrange, a little more forgiving of less-than-stellar recordings, but every bit as gorgeous.
You might also consider the Triangle Borea BR04 ($649/pair), which former SoundStage! Solo editor and current Wirecutter speaker expert Brent Butterworth recommends. I haven’t heard the BR04, but I dig the BR03 a lot, and its newer, larger sibling seems to stack up equally well on paper. It delivers a bit more in terms of bass extension (-6dB at 44Hz) and a lot more in terms of sensitivity, but of course it’s also a good bit larger and not nearly as pretty, which may or may not matter to you.
TL;DR: Is the DALI Kupid worth the money?
Even at its American price of $600/pair, I think the DALI Kupid delivers hellacious bang for the buck. Frankly, its price in the faraway civilized world (£299 or €338/pair) seems almost too good to be true. Again, the speaker has its limitations. Duh. You’re not going to fill a massive room with chest-pounding SPLs, and you really do sort of need a sub if you want much appreciable low bass at a listening distance of much over three feet. But that’s just physics, y’all.
If you have a smaller room or are looking for a good nearfield system, I’m struggling to think of any reason you wouldn’t want to audition a pair of Kupids. They’re gorgeous, their dispersion is incredibly wide, and their frequency response is close enough to neutral that no anomalies are standing out to my ears (although I’m dying to see the measurements, just out of curiosity about what might potentially be going on somewhere in the neighborhood of 3kHz?). What’s more, they’re incredibly flexible in terms of placement and setup. High marks from me, and when the email chain goes around asking SoundStage! contributors for their votes on a Reviewers’ Choice award, I’ll be chiming in with a hearty “Hell yes!” With an exclamation mark and everything.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Integrated amp: NAD C 3050 BluOS‑D
- Subwoofer: SVS PB‑1000 Pro
- Sources: Custom-built PC running Pop!_OS with Cosmic Desktop beta; iPhone 16 Pro Max; U‑Turn Orbit Theory turntable
- Speaker cables: SVS SoundPath Ultra
- Power conditioner: SurgeX XR115
DALI Kupid loudspeaker
Price: US$600, CA$600, £299, €338 per pair
Warranty: Two years, parts and labor
DALI A/S
Dali Allé 1
Nørager
Nordjylland 9610
Denmark
Phone: +45 9672 1155
Website: www.dali-speakers.com
North American distributor:
Lenbrook Americas
633 Granite Court
Pickering, Ontario L1W 3K1
Canada
Phone: 1-800-263-4666
Email: info@lenbrookamericas.com
Website: www.lenbrookamericas.com/dali-speakers/
