Devialet Phantom II 98dB Review India 2024: I Didn’t Expect to Feel Guilty About a Speaker and then I did
The guilty feeling came on a Tuesday evening.
I’d had the Phantom II 98dB for about ten days. It was sitting on my bookshelf in the living room- Iconic White, which I chose because my wife said the Matte Black would make it look like a security camera. She wasn’t entirely wrong.
I was listening to an old Kishore Kumar track. Not even a great recording, one of those mid-70s Bollywood productions where the orchestra sounds like it was captured through a single microphone in a corridor. I’ve heard this song maybe four hundred times in my life.
And then I heard something in it I’d never heard before. A tabla stroke in the left channel, slightly behind the main mix, that I genuinely did not know existed in this recording.
That’s when the guilt arrived. Because I started wondering what else I have been missing? In every song I’ve loved for years? In every recording I thought I knew?
That’s a deeply uncomfortable question. The Phantom II 98dB is the thing that asked for it.
Let Me Back Up
I should tell you how I ended up here, because the path matters.
I am not an audiophile by background. I grew up with a basic music system in the house, the kind with a tape deck and two speakers that sat on either side of the TV. Good enough. We never thought about it much.
Over the years I upgraded slowly. A decent soundbar. Then a slightly better soundbar. Then a Bluetooth speaker that everyone agreed sounded “really good” at family gatherings and cost around ₹15,000. I was happy enough.
Then a colleague at work, the kind of person who has opinions about speaker cables, brought a Devialet catalogue to the office one day. I looked at the prices and immediately decided these were for people with problems I didn’t have.
Six months later I was at The Den experience centre in the city. I went because I was curious. I stayed for two hours. I came home and had a quiet argument with my own bank balance.
The Phantom II 98dB won.
What It Is, In Plain Language
The Phantom II 98dB is a wireless speaker from Devialet, a French company that has been making audio engineers uncomfortable since 2007 by doing things that shouldn’t be possible.
It’s compact. Genuinely compact, smaller than you’re picturing right now. It sits easily on a bookshelf or a side table. It weighs about 3.5kg. It comes in Iconic White, Matte Black, or the special Opéra de Paris gold leaf edition if you have ₹1,99,999 and a certain kind of personality.
It is also and I want to be careful about how I say this because I know how it sounds one of the most genuinely surprising pieces of technology I have encountered in a long time. Not because of what it is. Because of the gap between what it looks like and what comes out of it.
400 watts. Bass that reaches 18Hz a frequency you feel in your body before your brain registers it as sound. Roon Ready. AirPlay 2. Spotify Connect. The same amplification technology Devialet uses in their ₹10 lakh+ Expert Pro amplifiers miniaturized into something the size of a large grapefruit.
The First Week Was Confusing
I want to be honest about this because nobody talks about it.
The first two or three days, I wasn’t sure I’d made the right decision.
Not because it sounded bad. It didn’t. But it sounded different from what I expected, and different takes time to understand.
I was expecting the kind of immediately impressive, slightly exaggerated, slightly exciting sound that most premium speakers do. That first-listen wow factor where everything sounds a bit brighter and bassier than real life the audio equivalent of Instagram filters.
The Phantom II doesn’t do that. It sounds accurate. Which means it sounds like the recording. Which means some of my favourite recordings, particularly a lot of the compressed, loudness-war-era stuff from the 2000s sounded exactly as mediocre as they apparently are.
That was disorienting for about a week. And then something shifted. I started reaching for better-recorded music. I started listening to things I’d ignored because they seemed “boring” jazz, classical, acoustic recordings. I started noticing what good production actually sounds like when a speaker doesn’t hide it.
By day ten I was having the tabla moment with Kishore Kumar. So it worked out.
The Bass Situation
I have a specific neighbour situation that I think many Indian apartment dwellers will relate to.
Uncle ji on the floor below has complained about bass from my previous setup exactly twice. Once during a Diwali party which was fair. Once at 9pm on a Saturday which was not fair but I let it go.
Before getting the Phantom II I was genuinely worried. 18Hz bass response. 400 watts. In a concrete Mumbai building.
The reality surprised me. The Phantom II’s bass is not boom-bass. It doesn’t rattle. It doesn’t thump through floors. The push-push woofer design has two bass drivers firing in opposite directions, cancelling out cabinet vibration while doubling output means the bass is focused and controlled rather than dispersed. At reasonable evening volumes, Uncle ji has had nothing to report. I’m not pushing it at 11pm. That would be unreasonable regardless of the speaker but for regular listening, the bass is deep without being invasive.
What it does do is give you frequencies that cheaper speakers simply don’t reproduce at all. The weight beneath an orchestral piece. The physical presence of a tabla at full dynamics. The subsonic rumble in certain electronic music that tells you the producer intended something specific. You hear all of it. It’s not aggressive. It’s just complete.
The Honest Limitations Because There Are Some
I want to mention two things that genuinely gave me pause.
One: It’s mains-powered. It doesn’t go anywhere.
This sounds obvious but it took some mental adjustment. I’ve become so used to Bluetooth speakers that the idea of a speaker being permanently tethered to a wall felt like a limitation. The Phantom II lives where you put it. If you want portable audio, Devialet makes the Mania for that. The Phantom II is not the Mania.
Two: One unit does not give you true stereo.
The Phantom II creates an impressively wide soundstage for a single sphere. But if you’ve heard a proper two-speaker stereo setup with genuine left-right separation you’ll know there’s a difference. The Phantom II does an excellent impression of stereo. It isn’t stereo. Two Phantom IIs paired together through the app are stereo. One is very good mono-ish with spatial processing.
I say this not to put you off, one Phantom II still sounds extraordinary. But if true stereo separation is your priority, budget for two, or look at the Phantom I with a stereo pair setup.
The Comparing Everyone Does Online
People online love comparing the Phantom II to the Phantom I 103dB and asking which is better. Here’s my genuinely honest take.
The Phantom I 103dB at ₹2,51,999 gives you more power 750 watts vs 400 and goes marginally deeper in bass. It’s physically larger. It’s better suited to bigger rooms.
The Phantom II 98dB at ₹1,78,999 is not a lesser product. It’s a smaller product for smaller spaces. In my apartment a standard Mumbai living room, not a dedicated listening room, the Phantom II is more than enough. Genuinely more than enough. I’ve never once thought “I wish this was louder.” I’ve thought “I wish I’d started listening properly years ago” but that’s a different problem.
If your room is under 35 square metres, the Phantom II is the right Devialet. If it’s larger, consider the Phantom I. Simple as that.
Living With It Day to Day
Some practical things nobody mentions in formal reviews:
The touch controls on the top work well. Volume control is a circular gesture that took me a day to get used to, but now I don’t think about it.
The Devialet app is clean and fast. Setup took maybe fifteen minutes including connecting to Wi-Fi and doing the initial calibration. The app has an EQ section that I haven’t touched because it sounds right without adjustment but it’s there if you want it.
Spotify Connect is genuinely seamless. Open Spotify, select Phantom II as the output, done. No dropouts, no lag. AirPlay 2 from my iPhone works the same way.
The optical input, a mini-TOSLINK on the back, means you can connect a TV or CD player if you want. I use it occasionally when watching something and want better audio than the TV speakers. Works perfectly.
The touch panel on top gets fingerprints. The Iconic White finish shows dust. Neither of these things matters once the music starts.
The Opéra de Paris Edition – Real Quick
It exists. It’s ₹1,99,999 at The Den India. The side plates are real gold leaf applied by hand by actual gilders in Paris using techniques that are apparently centuries old.
I could not justify it to myself or anyone else in my household. But I understand the people who can. It’s genuinely beautiful. The standard Iconic White is also genuinely beautiful. Both sound identical.
Would I Buy It Again
Yes. Without hesitation.
Not because it’s perfect. It has the limitations I mentioned. It costs a lot of money. It will make your existing music library feel like it needs to be audited for quality.
But it has also made me listen to music differently. Made me appreciate recordings I’d overlooked. Made my living room my ordinary, nothing-special Mumbai flat living room feel like somewhere I actively want to spend time in the evening rather than just the place where I eat dinner.
That sounds like a lot to credit to a speaker. And maybe it is. But that’s what happened.
Questions People Actually Ask
Is ₹1,78,999 genuinely worth it or is this an ego purchase? Both things can be true. But mostly it’s worth it if you actually love music. If you’re buying it to impress people, you’ll get bored of that quickly and the audio quality will still be there so either way you win.
My partner thinks I’ve lost my mind. What do I tell them? Tell them you want to go to The Den Experience Centre together so they can hear it. The speaker has a better argument than you do.
Does it work with Jio Fiber? Yes. Any Wi-Fi connection works. It’s standard Wi-Fi 5 with no special networking requirements.
What happens if it needs repair? Buy from The Den India and you have official manufacturer warranty coverage in India. Don’t buy from random resellers; you’ll have no recourse if something goes wrong.
Is the 95dB version worth considering instead? The Phantom II also comes in a 95dB version at ₹1,46,999. Lower power 250 watts and slightly less bass extension. For a bedroom or small study, the 95dB is worth considering. For a main living room, I’d stretch to the 98dB.