hi-fi wireless active speakers
When we first visited Sonus faber's product page for the Duettos (they've since changed it), it was led by an artily-faded image of a young couple facing a pair of these luxurious-looking speakers on their dedicated stands, flanking a leafy bay window. The couple are touching, apparently held rapt by the music, although they might possibly have just nodded off. Anyway, superimposed over all this is a block of colour with the company's first statement about the Duettos which reads: “The sound of Sonus faber, now wireless”.
And really, that is so much the story here in a nutshell that we were worried for a while we might find little more to add. Everything else is just adding detail to that statement.
Although that assumes you know what they mean by ‘the sound of Sonus faber’, of course, and there's quite the tale of Italianate artisan craftspersonship behind that.
And then there's that wireless bit. Wireless speakers, they're pretty exciting in themselves, a potential all-in-one system solution, since you get the amps and streaming all built into the speaker boxes. The word ‘wireless’, of course, means they can receive signals through the air without cables. But wireless is a generic term, not telling you what technologies are available for wireless music transmission, nor crucially how the speakers talk to each other, which is equally important in terms of the final quality available from the system.
SUMMARY
Sonus faber Duettos
Price: $6995
+ Well-implemented wireless speaker
+ Gorgeous sound
+ Great looks
– No direct input selection (yet)
– Can't defeat auto power down
– ‘Hidden’ settings
So does wireless here mean Bluetooth? Or perhaps Wi-Fi?
Well for some of the stuff here, wireless means something else entirely, something new for consumer hi-fi products. Between the two speakers the Duettos use Ultra WideBand transmission — UWB. And that's the most exciting thing we've heard all this issue.
Build & design
Before we get all gooey over UWB, however, let's get hands-on with the physical Duettos, and see how they use more conventional Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to access your music, before using that UWB to spread it around.
It's almost redundant to say that these are beautiful loudspeakers, because they're Sonus fabers; the company doesn't make anything else. Up in the rarefied air of Arcugnano, a town in the province of Vicenza, Veneto, north-eastern Italy (also home to Bertagni, Italy's oldest filled-pasta producer), Sonus faber has a four-decade history of making artisan-style speakers back to the early designs of Franco Serblin. Its factory is a wondrous mix of traditional skills and new technologies, where over the last decade or so Sonus faber has been part of first the Fine Sounds Group and, since 2015, the McIntosh Group, alongside Sumiko cartridges and McIntosh itself. But this has not dented Sonus faber's Italian approach, indeed the wider funds may have helped this, as in 2021 when it acquired De Santi Woodmaker, a family-run carpentry business with which the company had already enjoyed a 35-year collaboration, bringing these “two leading ‘Made in Italy’ realities” under the same roof.
These skills, this legacy, is evident in the appearance of the Duettos even before you plug them up and start playing. One common characteristic of the brand is
