My Wife Asked Me to Turn Down the Soundbar. I Told Her It Wasn’t a Soundbar.
We’ve had this debate before in our house.
She thinks a soundbar is a soundbar. Plug it in under the TV, it makes the dialogue louder than the built-in speakers, job done. I’ve always agreed with her until Devialet Dione showed up.
The first movie we watched with it was nothing special. Some action films we’d both half-seen before. About twenty minutes in, during a chase sequence, she put down her phone, looked at the ceiling, and said “wait, where is that sound coming from?”
From one box. One single object sitting under the television. No subwoofer on the floor, no surround speakers on stands behind us, no wires running under the rug. Just the Dione, doing things that by every conventional understanding of what a soundbar is supposed to be it should not be able to do.
That’s the Devialet Dione. And if you’ve been on the fence about whether a soundbar can ever be taken seriously as a home cinema solution, this is the one that changes that conversation.
First, What Even Is This Thing?
Let’s get one thing out of the way. Calling the Dione a soundbar is technically accurate and also slightly misleading like calling a Rolls-Royce a car.
Yes, it’s a long rectangular object that goes under your TV. But inside that object, Devialet has packed 17 individual drivers, 9 full-range aluminium speakers and 8 high-excursion subwoofers all running off 950 watts RMS of their proprietary ADH® amplification. It reaches down to 24 Hz in the bass, touches 21 kHz at the top, and hits 101 dB SPL at max volume.
That last number 24 Hz is the one that matters most. Most soundbars with separate subwoofers don’t go that low. Most floor-standing speakers don’t go that low. The Dione does it without any additional hardware at all.
And those 8 subwoofers aren’t just crammed in randomly. They’re configured in opposing pairs the same push-push arrangement Devialet uses in the Phantom speakers so the vibrations cancel each other out and all the energy goes into the room as sound, not into rattling your furniture. That’s why when you watch something bass-heavy on the Dione, the room fills with low-frequency pressure but your coffee table stays perfectly still.
The ORB. Let’s Talk About the ORB.
You’ll notice something unusual about the Dione the moment you see it in person. Right in the centre of the soundbar, there’s a spherical pod sticking out. Devialet calls it the ORB, and it houses the centre channel, the most important channel in any home cinema setup, because it’s where almost all the dialogue lives.
The ORB is patented, and the reason for its shape is not aesthetic. It can rotate.
Here’s why that matters: most soundbars are designed to sit on a shelf with the drivers pointing forward. Mount one on a wall and the geometry changes. The drivers that were pointing at you are now pointing at the ceiling or the floor. Most soundbars just accept this compromise. The Dione doesn’t. When you wall-mount it, the entire driver array automatically reassigns itself (there are gyroscopes inside to detect orientation), and the ORB rotates so the centre channel always points directly at the listener, wherever the bar is positioned.
The whole system knows which way is up. Always. Without you doing anything.
That’s either engineering for its own sake, or genuine thoughtfulness about how people actually use products in their homes. I think it’s the second one.
What It Sounds Like – Really
I’m going to be honest about this, because soundbars get overhyped constantly and I don’t want to be another voice adding to that noise.
The Dione is genuinely impressive. But it’s impressive in specific ways, and it’s worth being clear about which ones.
Where it’s outstanding:
The bass is shocking. Not in a boomy, one-note way in a clean, physical, room-filling way that makes everything on screen feel more real. I watched a documentary about ocean storms on it and the low-end rumble of the waves made my chest tight. In Jurassic World, the ground trembled before the dinosaur was on screen. That’s not EQ magic. That’s 8 SAM-controlled subwoofers working properly.
Dialogue is also excellent, cleaner and more locked-to-the-screen than most soundbars I’ve heard. The ORB centre channel is doing real work here. Voices stay in the centre of the image even when there’s chaos happening in the rest of the soundstage.
The SPACE® processing Devialet’s upmixing mode for non-Atmos content is surprisingly good. I usually hate upmixing. It tends to make things sound artificial and processed. The Dione’s version adds width and height without making you feel like the audio has been tampered with. It just sounds… bigger.
Where it has limits:
The surround imaging the sense of sound wrapping around you from the sides and behind is good but not magical. It creates a wide, spacious presentation more than a true wrap-around experience. You won’t mistake it for a full 5.1 system with rear speakers. If a completely immersive surround is your top priority, know that going in.
There’s also only one HDMI port (eARC), and no DTS:X support. For most people that won’t matter at all. For Blu-ray collectors with DTS:X discs, worth knowing.
The Technology, Explained Simply
Devialet holds over 200 patents. Most of them exist because they kept hitting walls that conventional audio engineering couldn’t get past, and decided to solve the problem from scratch instead. Three technologies are especially relevant to the Dione:
ADH® – 950 watts in a soundbar
Conventional amplifiers force you to choose between sounding great (Class A) or being powerful (Class D). ADH® runs both simultaneously in one circuit. That’s how the Dione delivers 950 watts from a box that sits under your television without requiring a cooling system the size of a refrigerator.
SAM® – why the bass is different
SAM monitors every driver in real time and corrects its movement actively. This is why the Dione can produce genuine 24 Hz bass from 134mm woofers – it’s not a physical miracle, it’s precision control. SAM also has a practical benefit: it physically cannot let you blow the drivers. The system limits excursion before damage occurs. You can push this thing hard without worrying.
ADE® – the reason the soundstage is wider than the bar
Advanced Dimensional Experience uses beamforming to direct sound waves by controlling multiple drivers simultaneously to create a soundstage that extends well beyond the physical width of the soundbar. Some drivers are dedicated specifically to beamforming rather than output. That’s why the Dione can throw surround effects to the sides of the room from a single bar.
AVL™ – dialogue you can actually hear
Absolute Volume Linearisation monitors the signal and smooths out the extreme dynamic swings in modern film, mixes the ones that make you turn up for quiet dialogue and scramble for the remote when an explosion hits. AVL doesn’t kill the dynamics. It just keeps things listenable without constant volume adjustments. It works very well, honestly.
Setup: Easier Than Assembling IKEA Furniture
One thing I wasn’t expecting: how simple the setup is.
The Dione connects to your TV via a single HDMI eARC cable. That’s it for physical setup. The Devialet app (available for iOS and Android) handles everything else, detecting the soundbar, walking you through orientation, letting you choose sound modes. The whole process takes maybe 15 minutes.
Once it’s connected, your TV remote controls the volume through HDMI-CEC. You don’t need a separate remote for the soundbar in daily use. If you want one, Devialet makes an optional stylish tabletop remote that works well.
For music streaming, the Dione works with:
AirPlay 2 – iPhone, iPad, Mac users, this one’s seamless
Spotify Connect – just pick it from the Spotify app
Bluetooth 5.0 – for quick casual playback
UPnP – for local music libraries over Wi-Fi or Ethernet
And like other Devialet products, the EVO Platform means the Dione receives firmware updates wirelessly. Devialet has improved the Phantom speakers significantly since launch through updates. The same could happen here.
The Design: Yes, It Actually Looks Good
Most soundbars look like what they are: a plastic bar with a fabric grille, designed to be invisible. Dione doesn’t try to be invisible.
The chassis is wrapped in premium acoustically transparent cloth in either Matte Black or Matte White. The ORB sits in the centre like a design statement. At 1,200 mm wide it’s a standard soundbar width and will fit under most televisions without issue, but it’s deeper than most 165mm front to back because of the physics required to house 8 actual subwoofers.
Wall-mounted, it looks genuinely impressive. There’s a well-engineered metal plate across the top that wraps under the ORB to hold everything in place at the right angle. It looks deliberate and finished, not like an afterthought installation.
It is, by a significant margin, the best-looking soundbar available in India.
Who Should Actually Buy This?
The Devialet Dione is for someone specific.
You have a good television probably 55 inches or larger and the built-in speakers are embarrassingly bad compared to what’s on screen. You’ve looked at soundbars, but every review you read ends with “for truly immersive sound, add a subwoofer and rear speakers” and you don’t want that. You want one thing, set up simply, that works properly.
You also care, at least a little, about what your living room looks like. You’re not going to put a big plastic bar under your TV and three extra speaker stands around the room just for movie nights.
And you want the bass to be real. Not suggested. Not implied. Actually real.
That’s Dione’s audience. And if that’s you, there isn’t a better option in this format at any price in the Indian market right now.
The Honest Part – What It Costs and Whether It’s Worth It
₹2,29,999 is the starting price in India through The Den. That’s for the Matte Black version. There’s also a Matte White option.
Yes, that’s expensive for a soundbar. But consider what you’re replacing: a soundbar plus a separate subwoofer plus rear speakers plus the amplifier to power them plus the cables and stands to mount everything. A proper 5.1 Dolby Atmos system from a quality brand starts around ₹1,50,000 and goes up fast and you still end up with six boxes in your room instead of one.
The Dione costs more than the average soundbar and less than a proper multi-speaker home cinema setup. It sounds closer to the latter than the former. For a certain kind of person busy, design-conscious, done with cable management that trade-off makes complete sense.
Final Thought
My wife still calls it the soundbar. She doesn’t mean it as a compliment or a criticism anymore – it’s just what she calls it.
But the other week she came into the living room while I was watching something, sat down, and thirty seconds later said “okay what is this, it sounds incredible.”
That’s Dione. One box. No subwoofer. No rear speakers. No drama. Just genuinely, surprisingly, a stubbornly great sound that makes you forget to be skeptical.
The Devialet Dione is available in India through AVStore with nationwide shipping and official manufacturer’s warranty.
Quick Specs
ConfigurationDolby Atmos 5.1.2Drivers17 total (9 full-range + 8 subwoofers)Power950W RMSFrequency Range24 Hz – 21 kHzMax SPL101 dBHDMIeARC/ARC (HDMI 2.1), CEC supportedOpticalToslink inputWirelessWi-Fi (2.4 + 5 GHz), Bluetooth 5.0, EthernetStreamingAirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, UPnP (24-bit/96 kHz)Key TechADH®, SAM®, ADE®, AVL™, SPACE®, ORB®Dimensions1200 × 165 × 88 mmColorsMatte Black, Matte WhiteWarranty2 yearsPrice in IndiaFrom ₹2,29,999 at The Den India