Speaking in melodies
Unlike with other audio equipment, you can’t bring home loudspeakers and expect them to sing the way you hear them in showrooms. There have been many arguments about this, but I’m among those who believe that they constitute the feeblest tie in the audio chain. Why? Among the supplementary components that make up a stereo system, speakers (being transducers) play the most taxing role of transforming electrical energy to acoustic energy.
An awful lot of unwanted things can happen in between the energy transition since the process largely depends, among others, on the acoustic facet of the listening room. True, music sources have to be at their best to reproduce beautiful music; but most of them — amplifiers, preamplifiers, CD and record players — have designs that have already been perfected, affording them linear response functions and nil-to-zero distortion. In short, they are not constrained by the size and shape of the listening room.
In contrast, the performance of the speakers is affected by the ceiling, walls and boundaries of the room where they are to be placed. So even if you have the priciest and best music sources, the quality of the sound that will come out of your speakers will still be measured by how hostile or hospitable (in terms of resonance, power vibration, standing waves reverberation, etc.) your room acoustic is.
The cure for this, of course is having your room treated with acoustic materials that should absorb, re-direct and reflect sound frequencies for better listening; but there are, however, newer speaker designs which are said to have little problem in dealing with a hostile room environment. According to Bert Abella, the country’s exclusive dealer of the Italian-made Sonus Faber speakers, a speaker’s enclosure and crossover design and the choice of drivers are the key in making this possible.
However, he qualifies that, although progress has been made in addressing this problem, hostile room acoustics still remain a big hurdle for accurate music reproduction: “There are also other speaker designs which are making headway in confronting the problem, but our products have shown great promise in this direction.”
Selling Sonus Faber is not his day job; it’s only a hobby, he says. But he has been partial to the Sonus Faber brand since his teens, and this loyalty was what clinched him its exclusive dealership when Upscale Audio gave it in 2008.
Sonus Faber’s Amati Anniversario, the company’s offering for the 500th birth year of Andrea Amati, the master string instrument maker from Cremona, Italy, is just one of the company’s products which are easy to integrate into any room, unless of course its shape is extremely problematic, Bert says.
Its lute-shaped cabinet has rigid structures, with the engineers paying close attention to resonance control and carefully choosing the drivers that can deliver excellent sound dispersion. This is what differentiates Amati Anniversario from other speaker designs. The cabinet shape itself ensures a more consistent frequency response. To dampen vibration, the cabinet is made from handcrafted laminated sheets of maple of ample thickness and stability, and joined by polymeric glue with a high coefficient of viscosity. To further eliminate inner cabinet vibration, the back wave produced by the drive units is diffused to an internal reflex channel.
The drivers are designed according to the idea of “free compression,” making them easy to control, ensuring speed, and highlighting minute nuances in music. The tweeter (silk ring-radiator) uses an exclusive dual-toroidal wave-guide front plate; the midrange maximizes linearity, while the dual woofers employ an aluminum/magnesium alloy diaphragm and unique aired phase plug in order to produce bass with absolute accuracy and dynamics.
What struck me instantly when I got the opportunity recently to listen to Bert’s Amati Anniversario was the speakers’ uncanny ability to separate, while accurately reproducing, different musical instruments in an expansive soundstage, considering his relatively small music room. We listened to only a few vinyl albums, but it was more than enough to understand the science behind the famed speaker system.
The track selections on Telarc’s “Round Up” album, for instance, are difficult to reproduce — a problem that has brought shame to other systems. The Amati Anniversario easily engulfed us with the sounds of the West — whining cows, galloping horses — so profoundly real that we were kept riveted to our seats. And when Bert cued J.S Bach’s “Concertos for Three Violins,” the sound of the strings was so vivid that the notes seemed to float on air. With the Anniversario proving its claims to be the master in chamber music, it has become easier for me to understand why Sonus Faber speaks to you in melodies.
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