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Celebrating 29 Years Of Service To Music Lovers |
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Milan Speakers!
In a unique approach, good speaker designing with the great styling of Pininfarina have joined forces! Finaudio and Pininfarina have come together to offer speakers to the audiophile and home theater lover. Enter Aliante Pininfarina! The Aliante Pininfarina One/Zeta ($8,000 USD) seen above in Ferrari Racing Red (gloss black on the Vela stand) is a two way design using a 28mm silk soft dome tweeter and 170mm pentapolymer polypropylene mid/woofer. The impedance is 6ohms (min. 4) and sensitivity is 88db/w/m. There is also a new floor standing model that was still under fine tuning as seen above (New Model!). In fact i heard that other high performance audio companies are starting to partnership with non-audio companies. Stay tuned!
The famous and highly regarded Italian speaker manufacturer, Sonus Faber, were showing two new speakers. Seen above is their new Signum (3,250,000 Lira) two-way, bi-wireable rear ported speaker. The Signum uses a 6db/octave crossover @ 2.5kHz, 20mm silk dome tweeter, 150mm fiber glass multicoated cone mid/woofer, and rated at 86db/w/m sensitivity. Individual struts of solid walnut are used for the outside while lead and copper parts are used inside for resonant control. Frequency response is clamed from 40Hz-20kHz. Also new is an upper line floor standing speaker called the Amati Homage (29,5000,000). It is a four driver, three way design using two woofers, one midrange and one tweeter (my humble apologies but my photo came out very blurry). These speakers were being used for their room music demo and they sounded very smooth, detailed, and very extended on both frequency extremes (but not quite reaching that 20-30Hz range to my ears). Never the less, these speakers were wonderful sounding and could easy satisfy most true music lovers in my humble opinion when used in the right system.
There has been some recent talk about egg-shaped speakers on the internet newsgroups. Well, in Italy it is a reality! The PrĘcisa Acustica Nuovo II is a two-way front ported design, bi-wireable, 91dm/w/m sensitive egg-shaped crafted wood speaker which looked quite unique. This speaker would surly be a conversation piece at your next party.
For small mini-monitors, the Audio Physic room was playing their well regarded Step SLE (3,6000,000 Lira) speaker that was making some seriously good lower frequency response (even considering their small size). On of the "tricks" to this speaker is the special stand (3,300,000 Lira) which the speaker is attached to in a very unique way. As seen above, the speaker is carefully attached via a special, strong small rope which allows the speaker box itself to freely resonate. Unlike the usual "audiophile" thinking where a minimonitors should be solidly mated to the stand, this is where the opposite is desired. In fact the very highly praised old Snell speakers were also designed so that the speaker box "sound" played a big part in the speakers music reproduction.
Zingali makes many various speakers using a horn-loaded tweeter/mid driver. Besides home audio speakers they also make recording studio monitors too! The sound in their room gets my vote as one of the best sounds. They weren't using this big speaker seen here, but a small floor standing unit in their less expensive Overture series. Seen here is the Butterfly .2 (53,550,000 Lira) which uses one 2" coil driver which is loaded with a 12" horn for the high frequencies. Three 12" drivers are used for the lower frequencies. This system is Bi or Tri-wireable by the way and is about 96 db/w/m sensitive. Hopefully one day their products will see the American shores because, in my humble opinion, they are extremely impressive.
At the Top Audio & Video show in Milan there were a few rooms using the Lowther-type driver. In fact here is a good example of the Lowther speaker by Bel Canto. Of course good quality tube amplifiers were used. It never ceases to amaze me how good those Lowther speakers can sound. Wish more folks could go to their local dealer and hear them.
A groovy hybrid speaker made by Mantis consist of a pneumatic suspension woofer and band dipolar ribbon. The woofer is a Kevlar cone mounted on a magnesium chassis and crossed over at 350Hz (second order). Frequency response is claimed from 50Hz-20,000Hz with an 86db/w/m sensitivity. These Italian-made beauties haven't seen the American shores yet and would really give some other hybrid speakers a run for their money in my humble opinion. The woofer was impressively integrated with the tweet/mid ribbon from what my ears heard at the show.
Looking ever so Italian-like gorgeous are these small minimonitors by Pearl. The Celesta (shown above) were making some seriously lovely music (though understandably lacked deep bass). Reasonably priced at only 2,564,000 Lira they still used high ferrofluid-cooled 19mm soft-dome tweeter and a 100mm mid/woofer. The crossover uses precision 5% tolerance inductors, 3.5% capacitors, and 5% resistors! (Said in good humor) This all adds up to 13.5% :-{)+ . Ok, geek humor, i know. Sheesh, it has been a long day here in Italy.
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High-Performance Audio Reviews
