Sonus Faber Suprema Flagship Loudspeaker $750,000

[exupgh12]

The appearance somehow reminds me of Abbott and Costello.

 

[gadawg58]

So I can't get enjoyment out of my little fun to drive Nissan Versa only because I can't afford that 1.5 million dollar Bentley? Why would I care about that car, anyway?

I don’t see the logic of your argument.

Not saying you can’t enjoy the less expensive things in life … I enjoy my Toyota 4Runner as much as my Porsche’s just for a different purpose … my argument is that on a relative basis the upper quartile of high end audio is disproportionately more expensive than it used to be by a wide margin which is unfortunate in my opinion. Means fewer and fewer people will be able to afford the best the hobby has to offer and that’s a shame.

George

 

[Audiohertz2]

Not to worry those price offended will take every opportunity to disparage..

 

[Al M.]

Means fewer and fewer people will be able to afford the best the hobby has to offer and that’s a shame.

George

So what?

And who says it's "the best"? I'll believe it when I hear it. I have stopped being impressed by high prices a good while ago. The only thing that matters is performance.

SOTA price is not necessarily the same as SOTA performance. It may be, but it's not a given.

 

[andromedaaudio]

And who says it's "the best"?

Magazines

 

[Almostlast]

The appearance somehow reminds me of Abbott and Costello.

I was thinking the exact same!

 

[Dogberry]

Just logged in and saw this, as my 1759 grandfather clock chimed 4pm a few seconds late. Maybe there is some message in that?

 

[MRJAZZ]

I don't care for the red wood, but with the darker colors and at certain angles, they do look pretty good.

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I wonder what the crossover components seen behind glass from the side is, given that the crossover is external.

IMO, this new flagship offering from Sonus-Faber would look substantially better if the sub woofer colomn had a minimum of one more driver, and preferably two per column, and then the columns would be at a similar height as the main array..... As it stands now it looks to disjointed.....

 

[sigbergaudio]

IMO, this new flagship offering from Sonus-Faber would look substantially better if the sub woofer colomn had a minimum of one more driver, and preferably two per column, and then the columns would be at a similar height as the main array..... As it stands now it looks to disjointed.....

Yes, the speakers definitely look better than the subwoofers. Not sure why they chose to make them so wide.

 

[andromedaaudio]

Afaic ,
They should have made woofer towers around the same height as the Main towers and mount the woofers on the side , high / low
Then the bass comes in both high and low and it looks a lot more slender / better.

I ve heard quit a lot of SF speakers lately and i dont know about this series , but if your accustomed to Composites the smearing of the wood ( MDF ??) is obvious same goes for Focal.

 

[Audiohertz2]

Yes, the speakers definitely look better than the subwoofers. Not sure why they chose to make them so wide.

Easy , Baffle projection and gain ..

 

[Audiohertz2]

Afaic ,
They should have made woofer towers around the same height as the Main towers and mount the woofers on the side , high / low
Then the bass comes in both high and low and it looks a lot more slender / better.

I ve heard quit a lot of SF speakers lately and i dont know about this series , but if your accustomed to Composites the smearing of the wood ( MDF ??) is obvious same goes for Focal.

MDF is not like wood complete different tone ...


Regards

 

[andromedaaudio]

MDF is not like wood complete different tone ...


Regards

Wood can be okay , if its dense hard wood imo
MDF(wood pulp ) is the worst afaik , probably more used in cheaper series

 

[Audiohertz2]

IMO, this new flagship offering from Sonus-Faber would look substantially better if the sub woofer colomn had a minimum of one more driver, and preferably two per column, and then the columns would be at a similar height as the main array..... As it stands now it looks to disjointed.....

Wager a guess , these Sub Bass cabinets are a current production model being used to reduce development time and possibly tapping into inventory ..

 

[sigbergaudio]

Easy , Baffle projection and gain ..

Not at sub frequencies.

 

[Audiohertz2]

The reason for the use of a wider baffle still stands ..

 

[sigbergaudio]

The reason for the use of a wider baffle still stands ..

For speakers yes, and I understand that the reason they do the same for the sub is perhaps as a reference to their older / classic models with wide baffle.

 

[BillK]

I just don't know at 2x the price of the Wilson WAMM Chronosonic and the same price as the Magico M9s.

 

[Audiohertz2]

BTW it uses a bespoke Electronic crossover ..

 

[godofwealth]

Personally my recommendation to everyone on WBF is to save yourselves $740K and spend the remaining $10K on a Quad 2812x

As Peter Walker famously said 40 odd years ago, designing a loudspeaker is a problem in physics. At the end of the day, you input a voltage and the speaker puts out a sound pressure wave that your brain interprets as music or speech. Now what is absolutely critical here is that the distortion be as low as possible. Fundamental physics dictates that the drive equation for a constant charge electrostatic loudspeaker is linear. In plain English, it means that if you double your input voltage, the speaker puts out twice the pressure. If you halve the input voltage you get half the pressure. Anything else is distortion. The Quad 2812 (and its ancestors leading back 43 years ago to the Quad 63) are so linear that the famous microphone company Bruel and Kjaer use them to calibrate their microphones. These Quads are phase linear as well.

I don’t want to sound cruel here to what is obviously a labor of love and passion, and these Italian made speakers do look pretty (the earlier versions look nicer to my eyes). But as they say often in Washington DC, you can put lipstick on a pig, but at the end of the day, it’s still a pig. You can put as much gloss on the design of a moving coil dynamic loudspeaker as you want, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the drive equation is horribly nonlinear. It’s not phase true. Feed it a square wave and you get hash as output. The Quad 63 was so linear that to test each sample at the factory they just fed it a square wave out of phase with a carefully tested reference test model. If you put a microphone in the middle and the square waves cancel, you pass the sample. Don’t try that with this monster!

Here’s my advice to each and every member of WBF. Get a pair of Quads if only to remind yourself what a low distortion linear loudspeaker should sound like. It’s like keeping a calibrated monitor at home to remind yourself what true color reproduction should look like. I have three pairs of Quads that I would not sell even if you paid me 10x their list price. Sure, I listen to dynamic speakers (I have several at home) and a pair of Klipsch La Scalas. These go much louder than my Quads but you lose much of the coherence and the phase linearity.

You can spend millions on loudspeakers or amplifiers or servers or even cables. But at the end of the day there’s no getting around basic physics. Peter Walker once said he didn’t know how to design a better loudspeaker, by which he meant one that outperforms the Quad 63 in terms of its primary virtues: phase linearity, low distortion, flat frequency response, low energy storage and controlled directivity through an ingenious delay line system to approximate a point source.

The hifi world is still waiting for a breakthrough in loudspeaker technology, one that will be as linear as even basic 16-bit digital recordings. Moving coil dynamic speakers are not the solution, IMHO, no matter how many billions of dollars you throw at them. The physics doesn’t work.