Toronto Audiofest 2024

Demos hosted by Canadian manufacturer Acora Acoustics invariably sound good whenever I hear them at a show, probably because the company’s speakers invariably sound good. You could probably feed them music from a Fisher Price turntable and still be wowed by the transparency to the source. With cabinets made of extremely inert materials such as granite, quartz, or quartzite, Acora speakers project a sound that is so pure, effortless, vivid, and lifelike it makes other speakers seem like a lot of the sound is still stuck inside the cabinets.

I heard that same unparalleled sense of musical purity and effortlessness from the Acora SRB Monitors being demoed here. That’s right, those aren’t floorstanders you see in the picture, but they may as well be. Peel away the optical illusion and what you see is each granite-made, beryllium dome-tweetered SRB Monitor sitting atop an optional Bedrock Bass Module ($49,900 for the speaker/module pair, including the active electronic crossover), each of which is a 500W granite-encased subwoofer said to extend bass to 18Hz. This effectively turns the SRB Monitor into a full-range, three-way loudspeaker.

And full range is what I heard. Driven by a Lumin U2 streamer ($7500), an MSB Reference DAC with Premier Power Base ($79,070), a 450Wpc, solid-state, McIntosh MC-462 power amplifier ($14,000) feeding the bass module and a Gryphon Essence Class A mono/stereo power amplifier ($33,600) in stereo mode feeding the SRB Monitors, all of it hitched together with Cardas cabling, the SRB Monitors/Bedrock Bass Module setup delivered sound that was inordinately expressive, substantial, dynamic, expansive, and effortlessly extended at both extremes, with tone as pristine as crystal.