

- #Sonus faber grand piano domus driver#
- #Sonus faber grand piano domus manual#
- #Sonus faber grand piano domus series#
Three-way Grand Piano DOMUS costs $4,795.
#Sonus faber grand piano domus series#
Series speakers to a much more affordable price point: a pair of floor-standing, The elegant lute shape of its highly regarded (and gorgeous) Homage and Cremona With the introduction of the new fully shielded DOMUS series, Sonus faber brings Sonus faber products made waves both for their spectacular looks and their Once your productsīecome the object of lust, you feed the hungry beast. Strong reputation at the upper echelon of the marketplace. That's what high-end companies do after establishing a The Award-Winning Speakers Everyone's Talking About.īlow Your Mind Not Your Budget Unbelievable Sound And USAĪ decade ago Sonus faber introduced the Concert line, a series of loudspeakersĭesigned to deliver Sonus faber performance and industrial design at a moreĪffordable price point. According to the accompanying literature, a great deal of attention has been paid to the long-throw motor design to ensure linear behavior, particularly in the transition between forward and rear motion.The Sonus faber DOMUS Surround Sound System
#Sonus faber grand piano domus driver#
So, to add stiffness to the cone and optimize high-frequency dispersion, the 7" driver is fitted with a concave brass phase plug. While a two-way design with gentle slope filters gives you the advantages of simplicity, it also means the woofer is operating outside its ideal bandwidth, and is being asked to deliver the goods well into the treble. A 7" passive radiator with a textured cone surface controls the bass backwave. The Grand Piano is a two-way design utilizing a 7" acrylic-treated paper-cone woofer designed to SF's specs by SEAS, crossed over at 2.3kHz via a first-order (6dB/octave) filter to a ¾" silk-domed, ferrofluid-cooled SEAS tweeter. They're screwed in and glued, the goal being to reduce the low-frequency acoustic influence of the large, flat side panels on the drivers.

The side panels, fabricated from 1"-thick contoured MDF and finished in gloss-black lacquer, are acoustically decoupled by the folded-over leatherette. To cut costs, the Concerto line uses a simpler design structure that calls for an ultra-rigid MDF top, bottom, front, and back to be built first, then covered in black leatherette. And, of course, it makes an impressive interior-decorating statement. Sonus uses solid wood, but by slicing it up, "jointing" it, and gluing the pieces together in vertical slats, stiffness is increased and resonances are broken up. That's why most speakers are made of far stiffer and less expensive MDF. Why are the cabinets so constructed? Because using solid wood would create seriously nasty resonances. I think it's more company "color" than anything else, though the cabinets of the expensive Sonus models differ from most others in that they're built from solid, seasoned (dried two years in a kiln) wooden staves, or slats, which are chosen one by one "so as to control the harmonic structure of the resonances." I'm not sure how one does such choosing merely by looking at a slat of wood, but it means both beauty and expense: each chosen stave must be clamped and hot-glued to the next, and finally hand-sanded and varnished like a fine violin. Is that an admission that its baffles "sing"-something no speaker designer with whom I'm familiar would advertise? I don't think so. Rather, the company sees the speaker baffle as "an instrument which amplifies sound, not merely a container of sonic power with technically approved dimensions." According to Sonus Faber's product literature, a love of violin making inspired the woodworking excellence-and not merely for its physical beauty. The Grand Piano is the top of Sonus Faber's "affordable" Concerto series (see Martin Colloms' review of the Concerto in the January 1998 Stereophile), and the company's first and only floorstanding speaker.
#Sonus faber grand piano domus manual#
One thing I did learn: the company's incredibly sexist! The Grand Piano's owner's manual begins "Dear Sir." Puh-leeze! And I'm glad I didn't, both because my months with the Concerto Grand Piano were musically satisfying, and because it gave me an opportunity to learn more about Franco Serblin's company and why he opts for all that fancy wood. How could I say no to a review opportunity? So here's a pair of Sonus Fabers that stand on their own two feet, are graceful-looking but not "wooded out" to the max, and, at $3500/pair, would seem to be reasonably priced.

Plus, you're paying a premium for the magnificent woodworking and exquisite design-something I wasn't into, since I live with my stereo in a basement office/workshop/listening room some (who shall remain nameless) refer to as the "habitat for inhumanity." And then you have to put them on costly stands. What I've never liked was the US price: too high. I've never heard a pair of the Italian Sonus Faber speakers I didn't like.
