Devore’s New Orangutan – RMAF 2018

No friends, the profound John Devore does not have a new favorite pet of the great ape variety, he in fact, has a new reference loudspeaker which we got to hear at RMAF this year. The Devore Fidelity Orangutan Reference System is actually broken out into four separate cabinets, with two more mobile 10″ paper cone low-end transducers for the bass end of things – what John affectionally calls the O/Ref/B.

The the other O/Ref/A houses another 10″ paper cone woofer with a bronze phase plug with one 1″ silk dome tweeter and one off-axis .75″ silk super tweeter. Two ports/tailpipes provide release off the v-shaped back of the cabinet and the front walnut woodwork is much more beautiful than these images are able to portray.

Internally the O/Ref/B woofer box includes an active A/B 300 watt amplifier with a linear power supply. The rest of the chain was comprised of Air Tight ATM-211 monos, ATC-5 pre and a TotalDAC D1 in the RMAF tower room at the Marriot Tech Center in Denver. At our meeting on Saturday of the show, John told me that he went with no compromises for the bass cabinetry. The don’t need to be set up directly next to the main box, but are flexible and can be placed in other spaces within a room like a typical sub. They also take speaker wire inputs to help capture the essence of the rest of your rig.

The total summed response here from the rig was very special. A fun party track from Earth Wind and Fire called Jupiter started off the session, and offered extensively accurate highs from the pair of silk domes and tight lows from the O/Ref/Bs. But of course the soul of any song comes from the mids, and both the funky vocals and horn sounds were quick, responsive and rightfully charged with energy. A very solid high end sound from an intricate high end system, asking price should be in the $80k range when they become available.