Sonus Faber Grand Piano Home surround speaker system:
Page 2 While the Home system's bottom end was crossed over to a subwoofer (in this case a REL Storm III, distributed by Sonus Faber importer Sumiko) at the THX-specified 80Hz, it was clear that the GP Home's bass was rhythmically agile and texturally satisfying. Later listening in my 2-channel system confirmed this. The GP Homes went surprisingly deep without getting sloppy in the midbass. Though the cabinet design is a cost-saving idea, it is also said to effectively damp resonances and release unwanted energy. The front port means you can place the speaker as close to the front wall as you like, but excess midbass will result. These speakers deserve to be a few feet away from the front wall, where they should sound remarkably free of obvious boxy colorations. It's also important during setup to get the rake right—the angle at which the speaker slopes back from vertical. Driver integration and the speaker's overall image focus will lock in at one particular, not-too-narrow window, depending on your listening height. Adjustable spiked feet make optimizing this reasonably easy.

I played a variety of sound-effects-heavy movies as well as music videos, and the Grand Piano Homes did justice to both, never sounding strained or dynamically compressed in my fairly large living room—even when I cranked them up to well over 100dB. The GP Homes delivered a superb combination of textural delicacy, transient clarity, and believable liquidity on the Three Blind Mice/JVC XRCD edition of the Takayuki Kato Trio's Guitar Standards (TBM-XR-5041), which I wrote about in my review of the Infinity IL60 in January 2002. The Infinity system did a credible job. The Grand Pianos added a dimension of believability to the performance, bringing the Trio into my living room in a way the IL60s hadn't. Yet on sound-effects-laden movies like the unbearably stupid The Mummy, none of the impact was lost. Through the Home system, Roy Orbison's A Black and White Night was truly memorable.

While large-scale dynamics are key to good home-theater performance, both music and movie sound reproduction are more convincing when a system can deliver microdynamics—those low-level shifts in volume at the bottom end of the loudness scale. This is where small speakers, and those designed to a price point but with good frequency extension, often fall down. The Grand Piano Homes did not. They exhibited a sophisticated transparency and low-level resolve usually found in far more expensive speakers, where you feel as if you can look far into them and hear layered elements deeply buried in a mix. When you locate such an element, it comes to life aided by those small dynamic gestures.

Despite its smooth, almost forgiving overall sound, the GP Home will reveal limitations in associated equipment. Drive it with high-quality electronics and the speaker's transparency, lack of obvious colorations, and ability to retrieve low-level detail will have you hearing things you never knew were lurking in the backgrounds of your favorite movies. But drive them with lesser gear and the shortcomings will be apparent—as if a scrim had been placed across the soundstage. Speaking of which, while nicely made grilles are provided, the Grand Piano Homes sounded better with them off. They looked better, too.

The Solo Home Center Channel
As Thomas J. Norton frequently asks, why do so many manufacturers continue to build center-channel speakers with a mid/woof on either side of a tweeter? You end up with lobing, which creates serious response dips and peaks that rob off-axis performance of the intelligibility center channels are there to provide in the first place. The reason is aesthetic to some degree: consumers don't want a vertical stack on top of their video monitors, so when adding a midrange driver is not possible due to cost and complexity, manufacturers end up where they started: with the woofer-tweeter-woofer configuration. Sonus solves the problem with a 2-driver setup, stacking the tweeter in its own unobtrusive housing, which leaves the Solo looking like a horizontally configured speaker. It's not original—you've probably seen it elsewhere—but it looks good and it works.

The leatherette-clad Solo Home weighs almost 19 lbs and delivers the same smooth, open, nonmechanical, well-integrated, seemingly uncolored performance as the Grand Piano Home, with 2dB less efficiency and slightly limited LF extension (40Hz vs. 30Hz for the GPH). The Solo's match with the GP is hardly surprising—it uses the same drivers. What is surprising is the Solo's relatively high price of $950 when a single floorstanding Grand Piano Home costs $1625. You could say the GPH is an exceptionally good value at its price, or that the Solo's price is steep. It's certainly steep compared to the superb-performing (and -measuring) four-driver, 36-lb Infinity IL36, which sells for an amazing $499, but of course it would be a mistake to make the substitution.