I borrowed a Mania for a long weekend and spent more time looking at it than listening to it, which tells you most of what you need to know about what Devialet built. It is the rare Bluetooth speaker that earns space on a console table whether or not anything is playing — anodized aluminum, leather handle, a shape that reads more like a small object of design than a piece of audio equipment. My partner picked it up and asked what it was, and then asked what it cost, and then put it down very carefully.
What the Mania gets right is the trick Devialet is genuinely good at, which is making a small enclosure sound bigger than it should. Dual full-range drivers and dual subwoofers fire in opposing directions, and the speaker uses an accelerometer to detect whether it's lying flat or standing upright and re-EQs itself accordingly. The effect is a 360-degree sound field that doesn't have an obvious sweet spot — you can walk around it, you can put it in the middle of a coffee table, and the music stays coherent. Vocals are warm. Bass is fuller than a 2.3-kilo speaker has any right to produce.
The house tuning is Devialet's signature: everything turned up just enough to make you smile. Bass is generous without being sloppy, treble has a sheen, the midrange is slightly forward. For pop, jazz, and most electronic music it is a flattering listen. For unprocessed acoustic music it can feel a hair too produced — there's a small layer of pleasing varnish over everything that some people will love and some people will want to turn off, except you can't, because the EQ controls in the app are minimal.
The catches are the ones you'd expect at this price. Ten hours of battery is fine, not great, and slightly under the class average — a Charge 6 will outlast it. It is splash-resistant but not submersible, so it does not come to the pool. At 2.3 kilos it is portable in the way that a small dumbbell is portable: technically yes, in practice you take it from one room to another and not much further than that. And the price is the price. Seven hundred and ninety dollars buys you a pair of Sonos Era 100s with money left over, and a pair of Era 100s will produce a stereo image the Mania physically cannot.
The Mania is a luxury good. That is not a complaint, just an honest description of what's happening when you spend this much on a portable speaker. You are paying for industrial design, brand, and a particular sound signature, in roughly that order. None of those things are unreasonable to want. They are just specific.
Verdict: Buy this if you've already decided you like Devialet, or if the way a speaker looks in your house matters as much to you as how it sounds. Anyone shopping on sound-per-dollar should look elsewhere.