Sonus faber Duetto wireless speakers
With a four-decade pedigree of Italian-designed loudspeakers, Sonus faber has produced its first streaming active speaker system, following the success of its Omnia wireless speaker. The Duetto is clearly an effort to make inroads into a new market segment for an audience demanding high quality with as few boxes as possible, the Sonus faber Duetto loudspeaker houses a streamer, DAC and amplification under its stylish exterior, it or they are pretty much all you need.
The new all-in-one two-way standmount package combines a host of easy streaming solutions (Airplay, Chromecast, Tidal, Spotify, Roon and apt-X Bluetooth among them), it also offers switchable phono/line-level RCA inputs, HDMI plus optical inputs, as well as wi-fi and ethernet connectivity.
A dedicated app (iOS and Android) for set-up and control is about to be launched and there is also a web interface (Senso). That app is important because, until Qobuz comes along with its own Connect service its library can be streamed this way, as well as via Airplay, Roon or Chromecast.
The two speakers communicate with each other via UWB or ultra wide band wireless connection which has been created to avoid latency and interference in the connection between the two speakers. There is also provision to add a subwoofer although, as we shall discover, that is not a requirement in my listening environment.
History
Sonus faber was founded in 1983 in Italy’s Veneto region and has grown to become a well-known brand for luxury audio products. Latin for artisan of sound, Sonus faber boasts that it informs its engineering with the traditions of Italian design expertise, hand-producing speakers with cues inspired by centuries of musical instruments, crafted from organic materials such as wood and leather to reproduce sound as the artist intended.
Recently the more mainstream products have been produced in the Far East and so it is with the Duetto which was conceived in Italy but is built in China. In entering the new sector, Chief of Design Livio Cucuzza says that the intention behind the move into the wireless speaker category is to provide consumers with the Sonus faber sound in one versatile package.
“Duetto is a true Sonus faber stereo system, blending 40 years of premium speaker design, Italian style and materials with modern technology and streaming features,” he said. “Today’s streaming capabilities do not compromise quality but rather offers an even higher quality for an almost infinite choice of music. Place the Duetto in your preferred space, choose your favourite source, close your eyes, and enjoy a one-of-a-kind listening experience”.
Design
We are told that the Duetto’s lute-shaped wooden cabinet is inspired by musical instruments. The cabinet and finned heatsink to the rear have been created with timbre in mind while avoiding internal resonance. Sonus faber calls this its signature Natural Sound.
The company has a pedigree in engineering passive speaker systems and that was the starting point for the Duetto. Housed within the heatsinks are two amplifiers in each cabinet: a 100W Class A/B to drive the 25mm silk-domed tweeter with copper cap to help align it to the lower frequencies, and a waveguide to improve off-axis response, plus a 250W Class-D amplifier to drive the 133mm paper-pulp coned mid/bass driver. Its surround suspension and neodymium magnet are enclosed in the new Sonus faber ‘organic basket’, this is intended to prevent resonance and ease airflow produced by the drivers’ long excursion. Class D amplification means that the heat is not an issue and the electronics can be safely housed within the box. The crossover point has been set at quite a low 1.9kHz. there is one DAC per driver and a circuit board for the streaming technology.
The top of the Master cabinet is a stand-out feature, incorporating the leather-like Senso interface which allows for user-control of the speaker functions such as volume and input selection. The selection is shown by three strip lights which you either find fascinating or distracting. During daylight they were the former while at night, in subdued room ambience, I thought they were something of a distraction and covered them up. A small, handheld remote is provided but probably the least said about that the better. Most users will rely on the app and/or the top panel touch controls.
Sonus faber Duetto set-up
The speakers arrived very well packaged and are supplied in bespoke cotton bags to create a pleasant unboxing experience. The hefty-looking quick start guide is not as daunting as it seems, with just a few pages in each of several languages. While the app wasn’t quite ready at the time of the review, scanning the QR code supplied produces an easy-to-use web page for set-up. Firstly, it’s a case of connection to the local network by either wi-fi or ethernet (being old-fashioned I chose the latter); partnering the two speakers, telling the software whether the Master is left or right-channel and set some basic parameters.
Among the user controls are a +/- 2dB adjustment of high frequencies, whether the units are positioned in free space or against a well, a ‘loudness maximizer’ option, left-right balance function, how the network is connected (wired or wi-fi) and whether a subwoofer is in use. The same page can be used to install software/firmware updates as they become available.
I had some initial difficulty in that, while I paired the speakers, connected my network and satisfactorily streamed from Apple Airplay without any difficulty, the system would not switch-off: not via the remote and not with the top-panel touch switch. I was forced to disconnect the power. My second attempt worked much better and we were ready to listen to some music while my satellite receiver was connected optically for an A/V experience.
Sonus faber Duetto sound quality
The sound is distinctly different from what I am used to and initially this was disturbing but, over the course of just a few hours, my ear/brain became used to it and even warmed to it. Another improvement was made by changing from solid, filled metal stands to lightweight, open wooden ones, which opened up the sound. Ideally one would use the dedicated Duetto stands available as an optional extra and due later in the year.
I then used the webpage control to select ‘away from wall’ and to switch-off the Loudness function in order to introduce some neutrality to the output. Boosting the treble by 1.5dB also helped to counter the incredible amount of bass that is produced. Those Class-D amplifiers and the reflex ports certainly create some energy.
Control via Airplay was simple and I found myself listening to entire symphonies even though the sound was so dissimilar to my BBC-style monitors. These are clearly entertaining speakers, and none the worst for that. Indeed, a few days later when the listening panel assembled for their first session the ‘modern’ presentation was much favoured by listeners who were all at least ten years younger than I am.
Everyone agreed that the most successful application was using the Duetto in a two-channel AV set-up where they contributed sonically to a visual presentation. With a few DVDs of action movies, the soundstage was enormous, the bass sufficient for toes to tingle and the treble enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of the neck. There was dynamism as the pictures came to life and the viewer was immersed in the plot in a most lifelike and believable manner. While subwoofer output is facilitated, what we thought the Duetto needed was a centre channel output for, at times, dialogue in Terminator: Dark Fate was lost amid so much treble and bass.
Classical material, small ensembles and single voice especially, tended not to fare as well as rock, pop and jazz – although larger orchestral works were reproduced with a great force and vigour. Such that we enjoyed the mighty Mahler 2 (CBSO/Rattle); the Sonus faber Duetto clearly loves to reproduce a big sound. It does so remarkably well and sounds a great deal larger than its diminutive cabinets might suggest. By contrast, the fine Hallé Orchestra recording of Vaughan WIlliam’s Oboe Concerto under Mark Elder with Stéphane Rancourt appeared to suffer from a constraint, a tightening or compression, notable in the heavenly Lento at the work’s climax.
Moving to rock and pop the speakers excelled themselves and the panel wallowed in Usher’s Confessions, a studio album from 2004 where the performers’ power, dynamics and exuberance came through loud and clear. These characteristics repeated themselves across a wide range of material and I was struck by how well the live acoustics of the venue came across when we got to The Police Live (1995 remastered), here the Duettos were clearly very much at home, bringing the performance home with ease, quite literally. This was a far more vivid, more emotive replay than I am used to via my usual loudspeakers. Bass is quoted as being 3dB down at 37Hz, and the panel felt this to be no exaggeration, helped I am sure by the inbuilt Fletcher-Munson curve correction that boosts bass and treble as the volume drops below 20%.
Conclusion
My initial thought when I heard about the Duetto’s launch was that it was a way to achieve the typically amazing Sonus faber experience at a fraction of the cost. However, rarely if ever in life are things that simple. What we have here is the brand looking to attract buyers in a new, albeit complementary market to their mainstream products. They are trading on their enviable reputation to provide an audio solution they previously hadn’t catered for. And, in that regard they have not merely succeeded but done so with aplomb.
Certainly an all-in-one package like this provides value for money and it would be hard to put together the separate components (speakers, amps, DACs, streamer) for anything like the cost of the Duetto complete system. The design is stylish and the sound modern, upbeat, entertaining and involving. The Sonus faber Duetto achieves what it sets out to do, and this will undoubtedly find favour in many quarters and, in time, its users may well increment their loudspeaker experience with one of the marque’s hand-made precision models.