Half a century after it first appeared in British living rooms, the Denton name returns in the Denton 1S, a two-way compact speaker that takes its cues from a 1974 original while rebuilding the engineering entirely from scratch.
Wharfedale’s latest addition to its Heritage Series addition looks to improve upon the limitations that constrained the original back in the early 1970s, while also incorporating elements such as its relative size, curved cabinets and coaxial driver.
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Sound is delivered through a purpose-built two-way coaxial unit that places a 25mm silk-dome tweeter concentrically within a 165mm enhanced polypropylene mid/bass cone. Both drivers radiate from a single acoustic centre to deliver time-aligned, phase-coherent sound across a broad listening area.
The crossover network runs Linkwitz-Riley 4th order acoustic slopes at 2.6kHz and incorporates silicon-iron core and air core inductors alongside low-loss polypropylene capacitors. The circuit is mounted on a short-path PCB that aims to minimise signal degradation between components, a level of crossover refinement that’s uncommon in compact speakers at this price point.
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Wharfedale has also added a rear-panel Brilliance switch with two positions, Norm and Max. The latter lifts the response by 1.5dB between 2 and 4kHz to compensate for the acoustic effect of close-to-wall placement, an adjustment that extends the speaker to placed across shelf, stand, and wall-mounted configurations.
The cabinet shares the curved silhouette of the Denton 1 but replaces the original’s moulded plastic enclosure with fibreboard panels of differing thicknesses, bonded and braced to control resonance. A rear-firing bass reflex port double-flared in soft rubber is there to reduce turbulence and extend bass output down to 45Hz at minus 6dB despite an internal volume of just 11.5 litres.
Sensitivity sits at 88dB with a nominal impedance of 8 ohms and a minimum of 4.5 ohms, allowing the Denton 1S to pair with amplifiers rated between 30 and 100W without demanding high-current output, a spec that covers most integrated amplifiers in its likely price bracket.
The speaker ships in matt black, white, and blue colourways, with the Heritage Series badge finished in silver rather than the gold used across the Linton and standard Denton models, a distinction that sets the 1S apart visually within Wharfedale’s own catalogue.
The Denton 1S carries an RRP of £649 per pair and arrives late May 2026. Wharfedale is yet to confirm a precise on-sale date or which retailers will stock the speaker at launch.
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