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Indiana Line Diva 6 speakers

A very pleasant surprise

Product: Floor standing speakers
Manufacturer: Indiana Line - Italy/Poland
Recommended Retail Price: ± €1600
Reviewer: Piero Canova - TNT-Audio Italy
Reviewed: January, 2025

Foreword

In the panorama of Italian Hi Fi firms (though now owned by Audio Klan in Poland), Indiana Line is a historic brand that has always stood out for offering excellent products at reasonable prices. For a long time I wanted to test a pair of latest-generation floor standing towers to see first-hand how these components evolved over the years. Hence, when Indiana Line offered their new top if the line floor-standers I couldn't help but gladly accept the proposal, so after the closure of the Hi End Gala Show in Padua I went to pick them up and brought them to my listening room. With the help of my daughter I unpacked them and was able to start evaluating what I received.

A closer look

The new floor-standing towers from Indiana Line are called Diva 6 and are an upward extension of the Diva series. We are talking about two medium-sized towers (165mm wide x 310mm deep and 960mm high including feet); the weight is 17 Kg each. The claimed impedance is between 4 and 8 Ohm, the recommended power is up to 160W and the efficiency is 93 dB/w/m.

At first glance, the appearance is modern and pleasant: the quality of the finish is very good and the combination of light wood + white front makes them a modern object that is easy to fit into a modern environment. The grilles are positioned using magnets and, therefore, if you want to remove them, they do not leave visible hooks that often ruin the aesthetics. The cabinet is solid and well damped; the usual test of hitting it with your knuckles returns a dull and well damped noise. The connections use a pair of good quality binding posts. The drivers are quite interesting units: a soft silk dome tweeter, a 130mm midrange and three 130mm woofers wired in parallel. The three woofers are supported by a bass reflex loading with the output port at the bottom, facing the floor. Below you can see the detail of the biding posts and of the drivers.

The wood finished cabinet is perfectly rectangular while the 35mm front panel is tilted backwards at the top in order to obtain an alignment of the emission centres of the different drivers; a nice detail that is difficult to find in this price range. I will not dwell on the construction choices of the individual components: the tweeter has a very generous magnet and the rectangular front panel is in a rather compact rubbery material. The midrange cone is made out of Curv, a composite material made of polypropylene strips that are woven and hot pressed, without adhesives, resulting in a material that has the same mass as a polypropylene cone, but a much higher rigidity. In this way you get the best of both worlds: the damping of PP, second only to that of unpressed paper, and the rigidity of PP, approximately equal to fiberglass and second only to metal. Like the woofers, it has a rubber edge with a double fold that should improve its performance and durability.

The thing that struck me most are the crossover cut-off frequencies: 300 Hz and 3500 Hz. Usually the cut-off at the top occurs around 2500 Hz while at the bottom, with such small woofers, it tends to go a little above 300 Hz. In short, most of the music you will listen to using these speakers comes from the midrange alone, which in some way characterizes the musical reproduction.

As you can see, they are narrow and tall and therefore, to provide them with the right stability, they are supplied with feet that widen the base. Actually, they also have an acoustic function by giving the right distance from the floor to the reflex port and are supplied with soft rubber feet that help isolate the cabinet from the outside. In short: they are two beautiful towers, with a modern appearance and attractive design. The construction is very good and the speakers are well built and with small high-level details. Let's see how they behave when listening.

How do they sound?

Testing a pair of speakers is usually complicated by the need to find the right positioning. Getting the positioning wrong and therefore the interactions with the environment can lead to very misleading conclusions but in this case it was very simple. It was enough to replicate the positioning that I normally use for my speakers and everything went well without too many complications.

Hence, they have been positioned about 1,5m from the rear wall and the sides and oriented inwards with the intersection point about 50cm in front of the listening point. Already at the Padua Audio Fair they sounded very good and many visitors commented on the Indiana Line stand as one of the best sounding but it is clear that the possibilities offered by a system of a clearly superior level coupled with a correctly acoustically treated room offered that little something extra that could not be achieved at the fair.

The first aspect that struck me is the virtual sound stage: without too much work I reached the level that I normally obtain with my reference system. Width of the image is up to the side walls and depth up to half the room: believe me, a first-class performance. The high frequencies are reproduced by the tweeter in a very natural way; perhaps it is a little sharp from time to time but these are very rare moments. The three woofers move the air well and the low register is very present, much more than the size of the woofers would suggest. They go down well to 35 Hz; below 30 Hz the attenuation is evident but even in this case we are faced with an absolute level of performance.

The registers from the mid-bass to 3500 Hz are managed by the midrange and the fact that a large part of the musical signal is reproduced by a single speaker gives a truly unusual coherence and uniformity of reproduction. They have no particular preferences of musical genres to reproduce; they sound well all around and in any role they express themselves at their best. They are truly musical in the positive sense of the term: they do nothing to embellish the signal they receive but the reproduction that comes out of them is pleasant and coherent without those excesses of hyper-analysis that are very often found today in modern high-end speakers.

They do not need a lot of power to play loud; already with 30W they make a good effect, the important thing is that the 30W are really good because they deserve them all. Probably the perfect amplifier will be in the 60-100W range; the impedance curve is rather easy and therefore they are not a difficult load to drive. I tried three different amplifiers and none had problems; to my taste and in my environment they seem better balanced tonally with an amplification tending toward a dry low register in the sense that a too warm amplification could be excessive. We are talking about nuances, though. They hold their own against speakers that cost much more; to have something that clearly sounds better, be prepared to shell out at least ten times their price.

In conclusion: they sound great, are easy to drive and install and are not power-hungry.

Flaws: I struggle to find any; honestly I could keep them as speakers for my system without missing my Thiels too much.

Conclusions

I understand why many enthusiasts considered them one of the best listening experiences of the recent Padua Audio Fair. I also understand why many wondered why much higher figures were asked for a comparable listening experiences on other stands.

Aesthetically they are valid and modern so you can have them accepted at home without too many problems. They weight just the right amount which means that you can install and position them by yourself. You won't have to spend a fortune for a super powerful amplifier or one capable of driving extreme loads; they sounded great with an inexpensive NobSound amplifier so with a good 50W integrated amplifier you have solved all your problems. The last comment is on the price: in the amusement park of today's crazy high-end prices, the Diva 6 have an almost unbeatable quality/price ratio. The conclusion is simple: listen to them and you will agree that for many audiophiles they will be a notable improvement at a very reasonable cost.

A heartfelt thanks goes to Marco Visonà of ASM Distribuzione and his son. Not only did they lend me the pair for testing but, since I couldn't make any physical effort due to a small surgery, they packed them and loaded into my car allowing me to do the review during these holidays. Thanks again, I really appreciated it.

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© Copyright 2025 Piero Canova - piero@tnt-audio.com - www.tnt-audio.com

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