Capital AudioFest 2024

YG Acoustics speakers have always had a distinct look, but the massive aluminum towers in room 806 were unmissable, even if you only glanced into the room. These were the Colorado-based manufacturer’s state-of-the-art Sonja 3.3 loudspeakers.

YG’s latest creations push the envelope for technical innovation—not to mention total heft. The three dual-layer cabinets of each speaker, machined in-house from aerospace-grade aluminum billet, have a total weight of 495 lb. And yes, they are as expensive as you might imagine: $146,800 a pair. YG also machines the aluminum drivers in-house.

Take a tour of four YG Acoustics rooms at CAF2024.

Despite the massive presence of the Sonja 3.3 three-ways, they performed beautifully within the smallish hotel room, avoiding any sonic overload. How did they manage this?

In short, “ultracoherent crossovers” according to YG Acoustics’s CEO Matthew Webster. These crossovers are phase-aligned for phase slope and transient response.

“Because we phase-align our drivers to an extent that no one else—as far as I know—has been able to, and that’s all born of the huge amounts of simulation that we do,” Webster said. “The two 15cm midrange drivers and the tweeter are phase-aligned to within a degree over about six octaves, so three octaves above and three octaves below the crossover point, so to your ear, it just sounds like a point source.”

This attention to phase alignment also helps with room interactions and can make it easier to position the speakers within the room.

Many visitors probably noticed that these large towers’ tweeters are positioned up high in the top cabinet. Audiophile wisdom has traditionally dictated that a loudspeaker’s tweeter should be in line with—or approximately in the same plane as—the listener’s ears. The Sonja 3.3 speakers are 70" tall, so if you’re seated on typical furniture, the tweeters would be well above your head. Indeed, they were way over my head. Fortunately, Matthew Webster, the CEO of YG Acoustics, provided technical explanations that I could understand.

Webster explained how the latest modeling technologies enabled them to expand upon their earlier designs—the airframe billet dome tweeter, for example. The silk-dome tweeter here, which has a new lattice air frame behind it, marks a leap forward.

“The new lattice tweeter is ten times more effective because there’s over a million GPU hours of computational simulation that’s gone into designing exactly that shape,” Webster said.

Silk domes have many positive qualities in terms of dispersion—and sound. YG Acoustics wanted to figure out how to push the silk dome past its usual break-up points that would occur at around 30–35kHz. “We wanted to take that same silky sonic characteristic, that sweetness, but extend the frequency profile,” Webster said.

They applied a new kind of lattice air frame underneath the tweeter that attaches to the voice coil. (The air frame is visible under bright light if you look closely.)

Using the latest modeling technology, they were able to create a lattice air frame—made of a special aluminum alloy—to make the tweeter behave pistonically. “What the air frame does is it breaks up the first mode of the silk and supports it, makes it pistonic out to 40kHz.”

The air frame also helps with the angular spread of the tweeter and with dispersion—which answers the tweeters-not-at-ear-height question.

“We’re having to play really clever games, which we’ve worked out in simulation, between the shape of the waveguide which is around the tweeter, and the behavior of that lattice air frame to make the tweeter have a completely even response over a very wide area,” Webster said.

He added that the nature of this lattice means that the distortion is very low. And when it does enter the sonic picture, it’s almost entirely second-order, he said—more pleasing distortion.

Some familiar tracks seemed in order, so I cued up Andrew Bird’s Atomized from Inside Problems via streaming on an iPad connected to US maker Bel Canto’s Black DAC Control System stack ($40,000). Four chassis included an ASC2 Control Processor and DMD1 Dual Mono DAC, which included the functions of preamplifier, DAC, DSP, upsampler, streamer, clock, and phono stage—plus power supplies. Cardas Clear and Clear Beyond cables connected this system.

The sweet strains of Bird’s five-string violin came through as pure in timbre as I’ve ever heard them on playback. Microdynamic details came through that made vocals and instruments sound nuanced and natural. The low-frequency extension on this track can be surprising on a good system, and it was present here.

Backgrounds were silent as the music emerged, full-bodied and in full color but without feeling hyped up or forced. I camped out on the couch in the demo room longer than I should have listening to Khruangbin’s Evan Finds the Third Room and a couple of other older tracks from the Texan trio named for the Thai term for airplane. Bass was substantial, without bloat or boominess. A pair of Bel Canto’s MA1200 monoblock power amplifiers ($20,000 each) driving the speakers seemed to provide the speakers with good grip and control on whatever tracks I selected.