Stereo Loudspeaker System
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• Well-implemented wireless speaker
• Gorgeous sound
• Great looks
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• No direct input selection (yet)
• Can't defeat auto power down
• 'Hidden' settings
RRP $6,995
Take a pair of Italian-designed speakers and add amplifiers, network streaming and external inputs including HDMI, and hey presto — you have a complete hi-fi and TV system in just two boxes!
When I first visited Sonus faber's product page for the Duetto (it has since changed), it was led by an artily-faded image of a young couple facing a pair of these luxuriouslooking 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 o. Anyway, superimposed over all this is a block of colour with the company's first statement about the Duetto which read: 'The sound of Sonus faber, now wireless.'
And really, that is so much the story here in a nutshell that I was worried I 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 are 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' means they can receive signals through the air without cables, of course. 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.
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 Duetto uses Ultra WideBand transmission — UWB. And that's their most exciting 'wireless' thing of all.
BUILD & DESIGN
Before we get all gooey over UWB, however, let's get hands-on with the physical Duetto to see how the system uses 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 the brand has been part of first the Fine Sounds Group and then, 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. For example, 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, are evident in
