Sonus Faber Tower Speaker Comparison: Do they live up to the marketing?

[gene]

Italy's Sonus Faber has been crafting finely sculpted speakers near Vicenza for over 30 years. Today, we take a comparison look at the range of tower speakers Sonus Faber offers, from the merely expensive to the truly high end price range, to find out what you get when you mortgage your house for a sweet new set of speakers.

We explore their marketing claims to see if they have any merit and take a close look at design details behind each of the speakers.

Read: Sonus Faber Tower Speaker Comparison and Design Overview

What do you think about these speakers and their associated marketing claims? Please share your demo experiences too.

 

[TLS Guy]

Italy's Sonus Faber has been crafting finely sculpted speakers near Vicenza for over 30 years. Today, we take a comparison look at the range of tower speakers Sonus Faber offers, from the merely expensive to the truly high end price range, to find out what you get when you mortgage your house for a sweet new set of speakers.

We explore their marketing claims to see if they have any merit and take a close look at design details behind each of the speakers.

Read: Sonus Faber Tower Speaker Comparison and Design Overview

What do you think about these speakers and their associated marketing claims? Please share your demo experiences too.

The link does not work.

 

[gene]

The link does not work.

It will in about 1hr. You're gonna want to stick around for this one. It's a fun article

 

[macddmac]

never mind

 

[RochRx7]

Gorgeous.. I've seen the Lilium's up front and personal at a local hifi shop. It wasn't connected unfortunately as they were moving about.. can't wait to get back once it's set up.

They will have to sound amazing because of the acoustic placebo wallet destroyer transient effect is in play.

 

[shadyJ]

I have never had any complaints about any of the Sonus Faber speakers I have heard, they have all sounded nice to me. They would fit in very nicely with any nice decor. I definitely wouldn't mind owning a pair of some of the higher end of their speaker line! Not the highest audio performance you can get for the dollar, but they are gorgeous.

 

[Burris]

Nice overview, but the Toys have been discontinued since 2012, and the Chameleon release is just around the corner! The colors have also been updated, the Graphite (best color in my opinion) has been replaced by a piano black for all but the Aidas. Now it seems like the only option is just the red violin colors or piano black besides the Olypicas which are walnut and piano black.

 

[3db]

In my life experience, I found beauty is skin deep and ugly goes to the bone. Although these speakers are gorgeous to behold, I will reserve judgement on their sound until I see some curves and hear them for myself. The BS meter was pinned to the right reading the exerts you took from their glossy.

 

[DavidW]

Nice overview, but the Toys have been discontinued since 2012, and the Chameleon release is just around the corner! The colors have also been updated, the Graphite (best color in my opinion) has been replaced by a piano black for all but the Aidas. Now it seems like the only option is just the red violin colors or piano black besides the Olypicas which are walnut and piano black.

I do not know when they discontinued the Toy line, but I do not think it was 2012. The Toy speakers were in the brochure I pulled down a few months ago along with the colors and they were still listed on the product page earlier this year:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150319152354/http://www.sonusfaber.com/en-us/products

https://web.archive.org/web/20150330013907/http://www.sonusfaber.com/ContentsFiles/SONUS FABER_PRODUCT BOOK(0).pdf

David

 

[riker1384]

Just about every company has some pseudo-technical BS they use to market to the rubes. I don't think Sonus Faber should be singled out for this. It doesn't mean they don't make good speakers.

 

[gene]

Just about every company has some pseudo-technical BS they use to market to the rubes. I don't think Sonus Faber should be singled out for this. It doesn't mean they don't make good speakers.

Agreed and we never said they didn't make good speakers. However it's fun to pick apart marketing from companies every now and then. We do this all the time for cables so why not speakers too?

 

[DavidW]

Just about every company has some pseudo-technical BS they use to market to the rubes. I don't think Sonus Faber should be singled out for this. It doesn't mean they don't make good speakers.

As Gene said, the article never says that they do not make good speakers. What stood out for me, compared to other similar products, was not just that they had some techno-babble in their marketing, it was how over the top it was and the sheer quantity of it. It was relentless.


David

 

[ski2xblack]

They do seem to go full turbo-encabulator.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Sonus Faber makes some very pretty speakers. But their speakers don't sound any better than many good speakers that cost less than $5K.

However, people who buy ultra expensive speakers aren't exactly very concerned about getting the best sound.

 

[DavidW]

They do seem to go full turbo-encabulator.

Yes they do.

A modern form of this was the SCIgen computer program that I refereneced in the article.

It was written by researchers at MIT to generate fake computer science papers, complete with citations, figures, and graphs, to submit to conferences and journals where they suspected low acceptance standards to out this sort of questionable academic behavior. The program has generated papers that have sucessfully been accepted and if you would like to make your own CS paper to submit to an academic conference, you can go to the web site:

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/

Apparently it has even been used to fool the IEEE. Sorry Gene.

Have fun.


David

 

[haraldo]

Nice stuff, by the way there is a typo, you incorrectly wrote Adia, in the table....
I am not sure what I think about the performance, I auditioned Olympica 2 and Guarneri Evolution, The Guarneri's didn't impress me that much... but maybe it's a suboptimal demo setup....

but the finish is drop dead gorgous out of this world great, The Guarneri Evolution and Amati futura has the shine of a Ferrari Enzo, or probably as shiny as a new Guarneri violin.

If I only could afford Lilliium or Aida

Have you ever thought about looking into Serblin Ktema?
Also designed by the master himself

There's been some criticism that some of the new products are really changing away from what was Franco Serblin's original principles of speaker design, not sure what this means but if you look at the bookshelf speakers they are really quite different by design than some earlier models.
Read: Bigger, larger drivers, can play louder, but maybe they lose some sense of magic on the way

I can't really go into details as I really don't know what this can be about, but maybe the speakers bearing the Serblin nametag are the essence of what Franco Serblin stood for, and these are the last speakers he designed...

 

[haraldo]

However, people who buy ultra expensive speakers aren't exactly very concerned about getting the best sound.

How in the world do you know this?
I have a good friend who spent bunchloads on Burmester and Adyton electronics and $30K Adyton speakers, and probably more on power filters than many people spend on electronics..... and to say that he's not concerned about pleasure of music and getting the best sound..... is like being pissed off at a frog becase he's green

 

[PENG]

Their sound never impressed me as B&W, Focal and even KEF in the same price range. I thought they sounded good just not as good as the others. That's subjective, so some graphs would be nice.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

How in the world do you know this?
I have a good friend who spent bunchloads on Burmester and Adyton electronics and $30K Adyton speakers, and probably more on power filters than many people spend on electronics..... and to say that he's not concerned about please of music and getting the best sound..... is like being pissed off at a frog becase he's green

I meant most multi-millionaires and billionaires probably aren't as critical about this hobby as most of us. They definitely want something that looks beautiful and costs a lot and sound great. But they probably don't care if the speakers don't measure super accurately, etc.

Some billionaires may care.

However, as I've said many times in the past, I do think most high end speakers sound great anyway regardless of the measurements.

 

[gene]

Nice stuff, by the way there is a typo, you incorrectly wrote Adia, in the table....

Good catch, it was actually also misspelled in several sections of the write up. I think I got them all.