Most setup guides tell you to pull speakers away from the wall. Dutch & Dutch asks you to push its 8c back toward it. When Diego Estan of SoundStage! Hi-Fi heard boomy bass in his room, co-founder Martijn Mensink told him to move the speakers closer to the wall, and nudging them back made the boom go away. The reason is in how the speaker spreads its sound. The woofers fire from the back of the cabinet, so the wall behind becomes part of the speaker and adds bass. Higher up, the 8c has a cardioid, or heart-shaped, pattern, which means the sound heading backward cancels itself and little of it reaches the wall to bounce back at you. Erin of Erin's Audio Corner calls the extra bass "a free lunch," and as "a family person" he liked speakers that belong near the wall, out of the way. The 8c suits listeners who want full-range sound with everything in one box.

Start with the 8c itself, since it needs no separate amplifier or DAC. The amplifiers are built into each cabinet, and the speakers stream from Roon and Spotify over Ethernet. Inputs are deliberately few, so Mensink told The Ear that anyone with several sources should use a preamp. Erin fed his TV's optical output to the speakers through a small converter box. Hi-Fi+ gives the placement range as 10 to 50 cm from the wall behind, and the ports in the side panels must stay clear. Setup ends with RoomMatching. You enter the wall distances, then measure your listening seat with a microphone and Room EQ Wizard, which sends correction filters straight to the speakers. Erin did it in three minutes. If your room is smaller, the newer 6c brings the same ideas to a smaller cabinet with Wi-Fi built in. For a studio, the 8c Studio sounds the same as the 8c, The Ear says, in an MDF cabinet without streaming.

Dutch & Dutch began in 2014 as a spin-off from an engineering firm, The Ear reports, whose first work was public-address systems that used out-of-phase sound to control volume in parts of a venue. HiFi Knights says the five founders had built sound systems for venues and nightclubs before they set out to make something just as capable for the studio and the home. A monitor called the 8m came first, the 8c replaced it, and the Rotterdam company sold its first pair in late 2017. Mensink told SoundStage! Hi-Fi that the 8 stands for the three 8-inch drivers and the c for cardioid. Phil Ward of Sound on Sound wrote that "It was obvious from the first note that the 8C is an exceptional monitor," and ranked it with the Kii Three. The hardware has barely changed since 2018, and the updates have come through software, including a 2024 plug-in for Edgar Choueiri's BACCH crosstalk cancellation. Jason Kennedy of Hi-Fi+ told readers who want "to hear the future of high fidelity" to book an audition.