WHY OLIVE
Olive wood is a typical product of our region: its trees are one of the most widespread crops along the Brescia coasts of Lake Garda and Lake Iseo.
This choice, therefore, expresses Diapason’s deep roots and ties to its territory. Using solid olive wood to create a speaker cabinet is a fascinating challenge, bordering on the impossible.
The characteristics of this gift of nature, in terms of density and mass, make it perfect for the purpose, but it is a strong, sinewy, and in some ways untameable wood: using it in electroacoustics requires several measures.
Indeed, even taking the usual meticulous care to ensure adequate natural drying times, and refining it with a further stabilization process in vacuum ovens (to optimize the moisture content of the fibers), it is not possible to guarantee the integrity of a cabinet over time if it exceeds the dimensions of a Karis III.
This is why only the Karis III and Karis Wave can benefit from this extraordinary material. But that’s not all! Olive wood is so hard that even the tools used to work it—saws, cutters, and drill bits—must be special, made with materials far more resistant than normal. The reward is a cabinet of exceptional mass and density, which translates, when listened to, into a noticeable increase in dynamics, speed, and color contrast: “deep black,” one might say, borrowing a term typically used to describe the quality of video screens.