Sony NA2ES Loudspeaker

REVIEW
by Robert E. Greene
Aug 14, 2013

Sony is a giant of the audio world, dominating large segments of the mass market. But on occasion it also turns its enormous resources toward high-end goals. When it does, the results are always fascinating and impressive. The arrival on the scene a couple of years ago of the Sony AR1 speakers marked a strong re-entry of Sony into the high- end speaker market. And the AR2, a somewhat smaller and less expensive but otherwise very similar model, only reinforced the impression that Sony’s new speaker venture was definitely to be reckoned with. The AR1 in particular struck me as quite spectacularly good. Even though it is not a particularly large speaker, it could be convincing not just in a home environment but also in very large rooms (as at T.H.E. Show in Newport Beach, 2011, where a pair were filling a ballroom with symphonic sound most impressively). This was associated with a great sense of ease in rooms of domestic size.

The Sony NA2ES continues Sony’s foray into high-end speakerdom, but at a lower price point than the AR1 and AR2. Naturally, the first question that arises is what has changed that makes it possible for the price to be so much lower—the $10,000 NA2ES is less than half the price of the AR2—and how much sonic change is entailed in the differences.

The Changes Made

The NA2ES quite definitely represents that same personal sonic vision of designer Yoshiyuki Kaku. And many of the physical changes from the A series are a matter of using something more along the lines of mass-production techniques and less handcraftsmanship. (The AR1 and AR2 are built with a very high level of craftsmanship, akin to the making of a piano, say.) And there has been a slight compromise in driver choice. But “slight” is the operative word there. The tweeter assembly is something distinctively different in the NA2ES, however—I shall return to that later. In any case, in appearance there is little compromise at all: If the AR1 and AR2 have the look of fine furniture, the NA2ES is not far behind—its appearance is graceful and elegant and the finish is superb, if not quite as exceptional as the AR speakers with their hand-rubbed multi-layer lacquer.

The Sound: Facing the Live Comparison

As it happened, the NA2ES arrived to face a difficult test. I was in the midst of rehearsals of an all-Tchaikovsky program, with a big orchestra—90+ players. However vivid one’s ongoing memory of orchestral sound is, and I have been playing in orchestras most of my life, to come home on a Wednesday night from a rehearsal of the Tchaikovsky Fifth and sit down on Thursday morning to listen to a recording of it is an extreme test of a speaker’s mettle, so vivid is the immediate memory. As it happened, the NA2ES’s were subject precisely to such tests, and in many respects they acquitted themselves remarkably well.

Of course there are caveats. I was sitting near the conductor’s podium (outside, second stand, first violins—the front edge and near the center of the orchestra). From that perspective the orchestra is huge geometrically. The sheer spatial extent is not going to be reproduced in a home environment. But other things that are demanding aspects of the situation turned out to be considerably better dealt with than one would have expected, especially from speakers of moderate size.

To take the most obvious one first, the NA2ES’s offer remarkable dynamic capability for such moderately sized speakers. Later on, I heard them demonstrated at the 2013 T.H.E. Show Newport Beach in an enormous room, larger than almost anyone’s home listening room, and they handled that with aplomb. In a home environment, they were capable of live symphonic levels without difficulty, if not quite with the absolute ease of the considerably large AR1s (which are really remarkable in this regard). I did not push them to this limit, but the listed maximum input power and the sensitivity combine to give a 110dB maximum SPL estimate. Certainly they were perfectly happy with peaks up into the high 90dBs, which was as loud as I felt inclined to go, even briefly.

And the NA2ES’s had adequate bass extension for the orchestra, albeit again stopping short of the essentially full- range lower end of the AR1s. The bass did not go down forever, but it was clean and articulate and, if it lacked the really deep bottom end of the AR1s, it was, even so, satisfying in the bass on orchestral music and on rock as well.

The midband of the NA2ES’s is both very clean and uncolored. While the midrange driver of the NA2ES does not feature the cut and re-glue construction of the cone used in the AR Series, and in principle the simpler mid drivers of the NA2Es should make the speakers perform slightly less well, in memory (I no longer had an AR for direct comparison) the difference did not seem enormous. The midrange remained excellent. And human voices sounded very convincing. Paul Seydor was playing his favorite Sinatra, “Angel Eyes” from Only the Lonely, at the show demo referred to above, and the sense of a natural human voice was excellent, as it was in my home environment. “Silo” from the Scud Mountain Boys (surprise from REG, Mr. Classical) sounded just as it should— and the words were enunciated, well, as well as the Scud Mountain Boys enunciate words. And on the old audiophile standby, Opus 3’s Tiden Bar Gaar, the singer had the right Scandinavian sound, and the Swedish was nicely articulated, both clearly and with the accent just so, spot on. Natural midrange indeed.

Returning to the Tchaikovsky Fifth—I was using the Harmonia Mundi recording of Gatti conducting Royal Philharmonic—things were sounding quite convincing in my informal comparison of live recent memory versus recorded as far as dynamic capacity, bass extension, and midrange character were concerned. And spatially things were fine. The NA2ES’s do the vanishing trick so beloved of audiophiles—and so expected nowadays, truth to tell. No one will be disappointed in the space department with width and depth both correctly presented and image precision being excellent.

The New Tweeter Assembly

So far as good. Now on to the higher frequencies. The NA2ES uses a tweeter assembly, a three-tweeter unit, quite different from the single domes (per speaker) of the AR series. As I gathered from an interview with designer Kaku, this tweeter was developed to widen the pattern of radiation. He described having been impressed by the realism given to natural sounds by omni-radiating tweeters and his intention of retaining this realism without the difficulties attendant in a forward-radiating speaker of integrating a true omni design. The three-tweeter unit has a tweeter of ordinary size (25 mm) flanked above and below by smaller tweeters, with all three mounted in a metal plate so that distances can be set exactly—the exact distances apparently really do count. This design has been very carefully worked out, and it is done with extreme precision.

In some ways this tweeter is outstanding. It goes out a long way and smoothly so—with a 96kHz-based measuring system (extension to just short of 48kHz), I found flat smooth response to beyond 35kHz and extension even beyond that. The response claimed by the manufacturer (to 45kHz) is really there. And the tweeter unit presents a very high level of resolution in audible terms. If you are wondering on the John Eargle Dvorák New World recording on Delos (New Jersey Symphony. Macal, cond.) just exactly how the first violins are articulating their tremolo in the tremolo passages, wonder no more—it is perfectly laid bare. High percussion is similarly clear as the proverbial crystal—cymbals really sound like cymbals. And so it goes. If high-frequency detail and precision are your thing, prepare to be entranced.

But the flip side of this picture is that the NA2ES does tend to advertise its treble a bit. In literal terms, the response dips slightly just before where the tweeter comes in and then a little after the tweeter does come in, the response comes up to above the overall level lower down in the midrange. Not a lot above, but enough to be heard as some extra tweet-i-ness, set off by the dip just below.

The AR1 and AR2 speakers also had a somewhat rising top end on axis, but perhaps because of the wider dispersion pattern of the NA2ES tweeter, the perceived treble prominence is somewhat more pronounced and not easily ameliorated by listening off-axis a bit, as you can with the A Series. Of course you can turn the top down with a DSP EQ if so inclined. But set to on-axis flat, the wide pattern of the tweeter makes its presence felt a bit more than would be the case with a 25mm dome alone—or so it seemed. This effect will be rather room dependent—in a room with acoustically soft sidewalls one will hear the off-axis energy less conspicuously.

This whole situation illustrates some basic issues. Audiophiles like to talk about “resolution” as if it were an item independent of other audio categories, and they like to check it by listening for whether they can hear this, that, or the other detail in recordings. Of course, there is some element of truth in this in that audio components, including speakers when they are playing, make noise and have distortion, both of which can obscure detail. But this element of truth is only a small part of the real picture. Perceived resolution in this sense of hearing things otherwise inaudible is for the most part an issue of frequency response. More top provides more detail, various kinds of dips further down unmask sounds that would otherwise be masked, and so on. In short, one can pay a price in terms of neutral balance in order to get perceived “resolution.” The tweeter of the NA2ES offers a lot of detail, but one pays the price of having a toppier sound than is really neutral, or so it is to my ears (and, comes to that, my measurements).

In Summary

The NA2ES has a lot to offer: Elegant appearance, surprising dynamic power for a speaker of modest size, excellent if not totally extended bass performance, clean natural midrange, and abundant perceived resolution, but this last comes at the price of a bit of excess perceived treble. This is a compromise that is quite popular in high end today. If it pleases your ears, the NA2ES will surely please in all other directions in my estimation.

SPECS & PRICING

Type: Three-way, six-driver, bass-reflex floorstanding speaker
Drivers: 25mm soft-dome tweeter, two 19mm softdome tweeters (per speaker), 130mm paper-cone woofer, two 165mm aluminum-cone woofers
Frequency response: 45Hz–45kHz, -10dB
Crossover frequencies: 100Hz, 4kHz, multi-slope network
Sensitivity: 90dB (2.83V input)
Impedance: 4 ohms (nominal)
Maximum instantaneous input power: 100 watts
Dimensions: 10″ x 35.4″ x 16.3″
Weight: 70.5 lbs.
Price: $10,000