WIDE ANGLE

Sonus Faber Design Lab and Factory Tour Page 2

Demo Time!
One of the best parts of visiting an audio manufacturer’s headquarters is experiencing the listening rooms where engineers and designers put new products through their paces. Often, these facilities are equipped with the latest and greatest gear, and the rooms carefully treated to elicit best performance.

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Lumina V music demo conducted by Sonus faber brand ambassador Paolo Terreza (right), along with Joshua Dellinger, product marketing brand experience for the McIntosh Group (left).

Starting out in the Sonus faber’s “small” listening room, we were treated to a demo of the company’s new Lumina V tower ($2,799/pair), the big brother to the Lumina III model Sound & Vision reviewed. This space houses a 7.4.4 speaker configuration featuring the company’s gorgeous Palladio speaker—a walnut-faced in-wall that’s meant to be seen rather than hidden away—along with the company’s in-ceiling speakers for Atmos height effects.

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Maxima Amator music demo. These speakers are 2-way towers with all-wood cabinets—a unique design and a certain challenge for the company’s acoustical engineers.

Electronics used for this demo included a Lumin U1 streaming Tidal to a McIntosh D1100 (used as a DAC with fixed output) feeding a Rotel RA-1592MKII integrated—big brother to the RA-1572MKII Sound & Vision recently reviewed—that served purely as an amplifier.

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McIntosh component stack in the Sonus faber listening room.

The next speaker we listened with was the Maxima Amator ($15,000/pair), a recent model that’s the latest addition to the company’s Heritage collection. This stunning, solid walnut-encased 2-way tower was fed by a full McIntosh component stack, with the Lumin streamer again used as a source.

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Sonus faber CI business developer Roberto Gamba details the equipment and setup used for the home theater demonstration.

After soaking in the alluring sounds put out by both the Lumina V and Maxima Amator, we next moved on to the company’s larger listening room for home theater demos. This space houses a 9.6.4 speaker configuration, also using the Palladios along with four of the company’s Gravis VI subwoofers—two up front and two in the room’s rear corners, with each sub individually handling bass for the front and rear left/right channels along with LFE. The system’s electronics included McIntosh amps, a Kaleidescape server, and a Trinnov Altitude 32 surround processor, big brother to the Altitude 16 model also reviewed by Sound & Vision earlier this year. The sound was strikingly powerful for an all-in-wall system, especially given the large room size, while the system’s six overhead speakers created a nice sense of immersion.

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Located in the company’s design lab, the home theater demo room features a 9.6.4 speaker configuration using Palladio in-walls, Sonus faber in-ceiling speakers, and four Gravis VI subwoofers.

Arrivederci
Any time in Italy is time well-spent and getting to visit one of Europe’s leading speaker brands, learn about its history, and witness its products being executed by hand was a special experience. I came away from it with a strong appreciation for Sonus faber and for the skill and dedication its employees and associates put into crafting unique, high-performance speakers.