The Sonus Faber Aida

The New York debut of Sonus Faber's stunning-looking Aida ($120,000/pair) was compromised by sub-optimal room acoustics and too much noise from outside the dem area. But the speaker, powered by Audio Research's new Reference 250 monoblocks ($25,900/pair) lived up to the promise in Las Vegas. But as I had found in New York, the true magic of the Aida was only to be found if you sat exactly in the sweet spot, when the speakers disappeared and the end of the room dissolved into the recorded acoustic. Certainly the team from WhatsBestForum.com sitting in front of my camera—Hi Steve!—were enjoying what the Aidas' were doing.

The rest of the system comprised an SME Model 20/3 turntable/tonearm ($17,000) with a Palos Presentation cartridge ($3995), an Audio Research CD8 ($9995) and DAC8 ($4995), Reference Phono 2SE ($12,995) and Reference 5SE linestage ($12,995), all connected with Shunyata cables. Racks were the ubiquitous Harmonic Resolution Systems SXRs and power conditioning was also by Shunyata.

COMMENTS
audiofederation's picture

Hi J.A. :-)

 

Seems like there was a little mixup and 'Harmonic Recovery System' was typed in instead of 'Harmonic Resolution Systems'.

 

Thanks for providing all this nice juicy information about everything at the show. More people than you know find this really useful, and, in fact, quite enjoyable.

 

Take care,

-Mike

John Atkinson's picture

Thanks for the correction, Mike. I've fixed the error. Blame my inevitable post-CES brainfade. :-)

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

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