Four years ago, I reviewed the Acora Acoustics SRC-1, a two-way floorstander that was one of the Canadian loudspeaker-manufacturer’s first three products. Acora is a relative newcomer to the high-end industry, launching in 2018, but the company’s profile has been high from nearly the beginning, in large part because of the attention-grabbing granite enclosures of its transducers. For more than half a century, Acora founder Valerio Cora’s family business in Toronto has been “dimension stone”—natural rock or stone that’s cut to a specific size and shape. Cora is an IT specialist and lifelong audiophile who had long wanted to build a speaker with a cabinet made of stone. This became possible when CNC (computer numerical control) methodology matured and allowed for pieces of granite to be cut to the sufficiently small tolerances (less than 0.1mm) necessary to create a box as airtight and vibration-free as anything made from MDF, solid wood, aluminum, or resins.

When Valerio Cora delivered the 246-pound SRC-1s in early 2020, he casually mentioned that a bigger Acora was something he was hoping to develop. In fact, at that time, Cora was already addressing the technical problems he needed to solve in order to offer a larger three-way loudspeaker. The 430-pound, $218,000/pair VRC (the model name is the designer’s initials—Valerio Renato Cora) made its public debut at the Florida International Audio Expo in February of 2023. It was played in a capacious ballroom with primo electronics and made quite an impression on the showgoers who heard it. I half-jokingly suggested that I ought to try out the VRCs in my home system and, to my amazement, Valerio said he thought that could work. I gulped hard. In my 225-square-foot room? Was he sure? Valerio was sure; after all, he’d been there. Robert Harley green-lighted the review, and ten months later, on a dreary December afternoon, a substantial box truck pulled up outside my condominium, followed 20 minutes later by an SUV carrying Cora, his wife Sherree, and Isaac Markowitz, Acora’s Director of Sales and Marketing.

Two large cardboard boxes were lowered to the street with the truck’s power liftgate. Valerio and Isaac wrestled each in turn onto a heavy-duty hand truck, wheeled them through the garage to the elevator, and up to my apartment. The two have done this together regularly but still don’t make it look easy—there was plenty of grunting, grimacing, and, occasionally, worriedly barked instructions. As they advise at the bottom of your TV screen during automobile ads, “Do not attempt.” (In fact, if you purchase a VRC, someone from the manufacturer, possibly Valerio Cora, will come to your home to supervise unpacking and installation.) Approaching their listening room destination, the cardboard boxes were lifted to reveal the VRCs sitting on a thick plywood platform. Boxless, they were transferred back to the hand truck and then to rubberized plastic furniture sliders for final positioning.

The Acora VRC is a truncated pyramid rising 52½” above the floor on its spikes, which are inserted into an integral T6 aluminum outrigger base. The footprint of the cabinet is 18.5″ wide by 21″ deep; the top surface is tapered to 8″ x 12″. Each enclosure is fabricated from six pieces of 30mm-thick granite, bonded together with an epoxy-based adhesive developed by Valerio Cora that’s more akin to those used in dentistry than the formulations usually employed by the stone industry. There is no internal bracing. A purchaser has a choice of several granite varieties, sourced from different corners of the world. The review pair was Black Galaxy granite, so-called for the sparkling gold flecks embedded in the stone that evoke the night sky. With smaller Acora models, Cora allows that the choice of granite species will affect the character of the sound; he feels this is much less of an issue with the VRCs. Around back, toward the bottom, are two 2″ ports and, between them and slightly lower, a single pair of binding posts.

The VRC is Acora’s first three-way design. Valerio Cora declines to identify the source of the high-frequency and bass drivers but will disclose that a small German company manufactures the beryllium tweeter to Acora’s specifications. A typical beryllium driver is smaller (26mm) than the VRC’s, which is a 34mm-diameter device. This results in a lower resonance frequency and—more importantly, says Cora—assures that “the propagation wave never makes it to the surround.” Two 12″ woofers operate in parallel, covering the same frequency range. The two ScanSpeak 4.25″ midrange drivers are the same ones seen in Wilson Audio Specialties’ top models, extensively modified in-house by Acora. Although the internal space of the VRC cabinet is a single compartment, within that volume each midrange driver gets its own hardened carbon-fiber enclosure. There is damping material inside the cabinet, a carbon-fiber twill, that’s meant to slow down the propagation wave to a point where it won’t excite the midrange drivers.

Attaching the five drivers to the front baffle is challenging, as granite is noncompressible and can’t grip a screw. Cora solved this problem by developing another adhesive, a “secret sauce”—Val’s term—that actually interacts with the crystalline structure of the granite. It’s introduced into the holes drilled to accept the hardware, securing the tweeter, midrange, and bass drivers to the enclosure very effectively.

The midrange/tweeter/midrange (MTM) arrangement of the drivers—also called a D’Appolito configuration—is known to reduce floor and ceiling bounce. Cora explains: “The original standard of a D’Appolito requires a third-order electrical crossover for the intended phase alignment; it was then massaged to include fourth-order crossovers with the midrange drivers of a three-way system. I don’t really care if the name is given: Yes, the topology of the drivers was done to control vertical dispersion, but it was also to create a focus window with the tweeter where the plane of the acoustic energy was [optimally] balanced.”

The crossover network, fourth-order as noted above, is related to the VRCs’ elite performance and the princely sum that is charged for them. While other manufacturers address issues of phase alignment with physical measures—for example, the multiple adjustable driver enclosures of big Wilsons—Cora largely irons out these problems in the crossover, which has been designed with a cost-no-object approach, in terms of parts-quality and the manufacturing process. “Even the internal wire gets into the thousands,” Cora told me. “The crossover support boards are custom printed for each batch of components due to minor changes in the physical sizes of those components that come from production variations we cannot control. We’re talking ten thousandths of an inch. So, we reprint the board based on a formula that keeps the intended tolerances. This is very expensive.”

In my 15′ x 15′ room—there is a hallway off to one side near the front that averts standing waves, and the ceiling height varies from 10′ to 11½’—the process of positioning the VRCs took Val, Isaac, and Sherrie about four hours. It began with minute adjustments to the position of the VRCs on their sliders until the best sound was achieved and then inserting the supplied adjustable spikes and meticulously leveling the speakers. There can be no question where Acora comes down on the issue of coupling vs. decoupling a loudspeaker to the surface it sits on. Any movement of the speaker resulting from playback will impact the sound, Valerio maintains—just a tenth of a millimeter affects a 10kHz band of the frequency spectrum. Isaac noted: “This is why some speakers get ‘hashy’ at loud volumes—it’s that movement back and forth. We often perceive that as hard or glassy.” When Team Acora departed, the central axis of the two VRCs was 8′ apart with the loudspeakers 2′ 4″ from the CD shelves and GIK quadratic diffusers behind them. They were also sited 8′ from the optimal listening position and canted in ever so slightly towards that location. Valerio declared himself pleased with the sonic results—a good thing as I knew I would not be moving the speakers from the exact spots where he left them.

Mostly, the VRCs were auditioned with my usual amplifiers, a pair of Tidal Audio Ferios monoblocks and then, briefly, with Pass Labs XA 60.8s. Digital sources—a Sony X1100ES for discs and a Baetis Reference 3B server for streamed and local files—were routed to a Tidal Contros controller/DAC. LPs were played on a Vertere MG-1 turntable and SG-1 tonearm fitted with an Acoustical Systems Archon cartridge. The phonostage was the Pass XP-27, which sent signal via the analog bypass circuit of an Anthem AVM70 on to the amps. Analog cabling was a mixture of Siltech and Transparent; digital wires were Apogee Wyde Eye (SPDIF) and Wireworld Starlight (AES/EBU).

From the first sounds produced by the Acora VRCs, their exceptional immediacy commanded my attention in much the same way that live music does. This was evident not only from the sweet spot at normal listening levels but also off-axis with music playing softly. Sherrie Cora commented, “An important goal for Acora speakers is that they can be enjoyed by all the people in the room.” That said, as placed in my room by Valerio, et al., when I sat eight feet from the front baffles, the sound was too immediate—very much a nearfield experience which, for me, simply doesn’t make sense if the performance was recorded at a distance. Moving the sofa back 10″—my ears were now close to nine feet from the loudspeaker—made an enormous difference. Close-up chamber music and small group jazz recordings still had an onstage-with-the-performers presence, while more distant symphonic fare had the requisite atmosphere and natural blend.

The VRC has no consequential deficiencies, but its strongest suit may be that immediacy referred to above. Valerio Cora maintains, and I can’t disagree, that this aspect of the speaker’s sound is a measure of their exceptionally fast, clean transient response. Possibly, the best orchestral instrument with which to demonstrate this is the modern pedal harp. (Castanets, woodblock, or claves might even be better, but in a given composition, these percussion flavorings are used only sparingly and are thus harder to employ as a sonic evaluation tool.) On The Healing Harp, recorded in 1994 for Philips Classics, Naoke Yoshino plays a program that spans the Classical era to the twentieth century. From top to bottom—the harp has the widest range of any orchestral instrument—the initial attack of each note was seamlessly attached to the main body of that discreet musical unit, no matter how fast the passagework. The nature of the sound’s leading edge is different for high strings and low ones, and the VRCs got the dynamic envelope and tonality exactly right. This is critical, as the essence of the tonal quality of an instrument is established by those initial transients; shorn of that information, timbral specificity is lost. Markowitz points out, “If you take a clarinet, an oboe, a violin, and a piano and record, let’s say, the D above middle C, if you remove the leading-edge transient, you cannot tell them apart.” The VRCs do many things right, but they are second to none when it comes to providing naturally inflected dynamics ranging from loud to soft, and everything in between.

Several aspects of the VRCs’ design are responsible for the loudspeakers’ nonpareil reproduction of musical transients, including the physical and electronic time-alignment of the drivers, the construction of the drivers themselves, the inert nature of the enclosure, the coupling of the loudspeaker to the floor, and meticulous setup. This part of the VRCs’ performance, in turn, contributes to the dynamic liveliness the speakers manifest in spades, as well as tonal accuracy and a believable spatiality.

In terms of low-frequency reproduction, the Acora’s produce satisfying weight and fullness. There are two things they don’t do, for which we should be grateful. First, they don’t produce bass that isn’t there on the original recording. Rock/pop recordings from the analog era often lacked deep bass (intentionally) and artificial extension can undermine clarity and power. Secondly, when deep bass is present, you can hear it as distinct from the bass content above 40Hz. For example, in the finale of the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, as recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach for Ondine, beginning at about 4:20 are a series of chorale-like phrases featuring the brass section playing full out. At the end of each phrase, the organ adds a loud chord of its own, considerably augmenting the bass foundation of the orchestral sonority. The effect registers fully with the Acoras. Likewise, with well-produced hip-hop—say, Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin,” the lowest synthesizer tones can readily be perceived as doubling a line an octave above them. I may have actually lost a small amount of deep bass when I pulled the “sweet spot” back. Especially with smaller spaces, a better compromise between bass performance and overall dimensionality may be achieved by combining a subwoofer (or two) with main speakers that are less than fully “full range.” That said, before departing, Markowitz measured a flat response down to 23Hz with the VRCs in my room.

Moving on to assessments of other sonic parameters, the VRC’s treble performance was unassailable. Manu Katché’s cymbal work on Neighborhood, his first ECM album as a leader, was exquisite. A jazz drummer has so many artistic choices, and the Acoras reveal the depth of Katché’s technical ability, taste, and imagination as he made musically informed decisions about which cymbal to use, how hard to strike it, and where on the plate to apply his drumstick. The burst of high-frequency energy that begins any harpsichord note, as with David Schrader’s performances of Soler Sonatas for Cedille, is produced gracefully, and with soprano Diana Damrau’s “Der Hölle Rache” from The Magic Flute, one can tell that there’s actually a person behind those remarkably accurate and consistent high F’s and not some high-F-producing machine.

Spatially, there’s good front-to-back layering of orchestral sections and the lead singer is right there between the loudspeakers on countless pop recordings. Sounds can image outside the lateral boundaries of the actual speakers, if that’s what the mixing engineer was going for. A related phenomenon is that VRCs will correctly scale different instruments/voices on the same recording. This is easily appreciated with chamber music where a modern piano accompanies a more diminutive solo voice—as examples, Dave Wilson’s recording of the Brahms Violin Sonata No. 1 (Abel/Steinberg) or another Cedille release, more Brahms in the form of the two clarinet sonatas (McGill/Chien.) If the source holds this kind of information, the Acoras will pass it along.

In a real sense, Acora’s positioning of the VRCs flies in the face of how loudspeaker manufacturers often develop customer loyalty and motivate repeat purchases. Usually, an elite brand will have several “lines” that are composed of models that get bigger and more expensive as one ascends. Potential buyers are told they should buy as much speaker as they need “for their room.” Not Acora. “I did not want room size to be a constraint,” Cora told me. “That was a huge undertaking. It would have been much easier to say, ‘Oh, they’re going to be for a big room;’ that way, I wouldn’t have had to worry about bass control. I could have left in a little bit of the [midbass] peak. Fighting to get rid of that peak, to keep it completely and totally flat, took me the longest time.”

So, while it’s true that Acora’s smaller speakers are designed to work in smaller rooms, it is not true that the VRC has been conceived to work only in a bigger one. Additionally, Valerio Cora maintains that the VRC, a 4-ohm, 94.5dB-efficient loudspeaker, can be successfully driven by relatively modest amplification, making the big Acora a more realistic consideration for more audiophiles. I explored this possibility by powering the VRCs with a pair of Pass XA 60.8s, which output 120 watts into a 4-ohm load and, at $14,250, cost less than a fifth of the Tidal amplifiers (which are rated at 580 watts into 4 ohms.) Analog cabling with the Pass electronics was Transparent Audio Gen 5 Ultra. I’d say that the Pass amps delivered 80% of what I heard with the Ferios monoblocks; this hobby has always been about the law of diminishing returns. There’s a good chance you would not need to replace your amplifiers at the same time you acquired a pair of these granite heavyweights. An enthusiast’s first Acora could potentially be his last— a VRC—the speaker becoming a valuable asset that stays in the family, rather than being traded in a few years later for something newer and flashier. “All of a sudden, you have a legacy product,” suggested Isaac, who compared owning a VRC to having an exclusive watch.”

A bit over-the-top? Perhaps. But stone is something that endures for millennia; consider Stonehenge or the Parthenon. These marvels of human engineering radiate an unyielding permanence. Valerio Coro likes to point out that his loudspeakers, the enclosures at least, won’t change over time, like those made of wood or aluminum. “A material like this doesn’t shrink, doesn’t expand, doesn’t care about humidity, doesn’t care about heat, doesn’t care about cold.” Granite is the hardest natural stone there is, 6 to 8 on Moh’s Scale of Mineral Hardness (diamond gets a 10). It’s no surprise that granite finds application as countertops, tombstones, and monuments. There is something monumental about the VRC’s presentation, both visually and sonically.

The Acora Acoustics VRC is the best loudspeaker I’ve had in my listening room. It could be the best speaker I’ve heard anywhere. It’s certainly the heaviest and the most expensive—and it excels in every aspect of sonic consequence. It’s also, sorry to say, not for me. Even at a typical industry accommodation price, it’s beyond my pay grade and a decidedly impractical product for a reviewer, given the need to frequently move speakers in and out of his audio system. But five magical weeks of hearing the VRCs on a daily basis with all kinds of music convinced me that this loudspeaker is among the most elite transducers that a well-heeled audiophile can consider.

It’s remarkable that other manufacturers that are members of this exclusive six-figure-per-pair club—MBL, Wilson, Magico, Rockport, Focal, Tidal, Burmester, and a few others—have all been around for 20 to 40 years. Acora has been in business for six. This meteoric rise is due to the hard work of its founder and the people he surrounds himself with, plus, of course, a uniquely conceived and high-performing range of products. It pains me to say so, but the sticker price could represent a good value. The VRC doesn’t require ne plus ultra amplification to reveal its across-the-board merits and, while $218k is undeniably a lot of money, it’s a lot less than the top models of the brands mentioned above will set you back. If you’ve got the means, the requisite space, and a powerful love of music, the Acora VRCs must be heard before you think about writing a check for one of those estimable alternatives. They are truly monumental.   

Specs & Pricing

Type: 3-way bass reflex
Driver complement: One 34 mm (1.34″) beryllium tweeter, two 4″ midrange, two 12″ woofers
Frequency response: 18Hz–40kHz
Nominal impedance: 4 ohms
Sensitivity: 94.5dB
Dimensions: 18.5″ x 52.5″ (includes outrigger base) x 21″
Weight: 430 lbs. each
Price: $218,000

ACORA ACOUSTICS
165 Milner Avenue
Scarborough, Ontario
M1S 4G7, Canada
acoraacoustics.com