Sonus faber Maxima Amator Speaker Review

REVIEW
by Andrew Quint
Jun 21, 2021

Let’s get it out of the way right at the start. Acknowledging that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, Sonus faber’s new Maxima Amator, priced at $15,000 per pair, is surely the most exquisite-looking loudspeaker I’ve reviewed. With a 12″ by 14″ footprint and standing 44″ tall on its supplied spikes, it won’t visually overpower a room. Nonetheless, the Maxima has a commanding presence. The materials that meet the eye—meticulously finished inch-thick walnut, soft leather covering the front baffle and rear panel, a piece of black marble with brown and tan veining for the integral plinth—are all visual calling cards for the esteemed Italian brand. The cabinet adjacent to the mid/woofer seems to bulge slightly outwards, but it’s just an illusion that contributes to the sumptuousness of the loudspeaker’s appearance. Small grilles to cover the two drivers are provided but the speaker actually looks better without them. The Maxima Amator is a masterpiece of industrial design that, with an aesthetic authority, doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.

TAS isn’t a fine woodworking or home-decorating magazine, however, and we must attend to issues of engineering, manufacture, and—above all—the abilities of the speaker when it comes to rendering music. Onward.

The Maxima Amator is one of three loudspeakers in Sonus faber’s Heritage Collection. All are two-way systems, as were the speakers introduced in the company’s first 15 years of operation. Two—the Minima Amator II and the Electa Amator III, both stand-mounted models—are the latest iterations of established products, while the floorstander Maxima is entirely new. As explained to me by Paolo Tezzon, once the company’s R&D chief and now its “brand ambassador,” the premise of the Heritage Collection is “reinterpreting the ingredients of the speakers produced by Sonus faber in its earliest days—mainly solid wood, leather, stone, and brass—combined with today’s know-how.”

The Maxima’s tweeter is the same one used in the Minima Amator, a 28mm (1.1″) “Arrow point” DAD (Damped Apex Dome) silk dome, a device used by Sonus faber since 2003. The 180 mm (6.5″) mid/woofer has a diaphragm that’s an air-dried blend of “traditional cellulose pulp, kapok, kenaf, and other natural fibers” mounted on a die-cast aluminum basket of Sonus faber’s design. The enclosure is divided into three internal compartments. The largest is an acoustic volume, treated with a damping material generally used for room-acoustic applications, into which both drivers are loaded. A second, somewhat smaller compartment beneath this is filled with a different damping material that Tezzon describes as having the appearance of “small stones.” In addition to minimizing cabinet resonances, this aspect of the loudspeaker’s construction lowers the center of gravity and, in general, increases the stability of the enclosure. A third small compartment located at the bottom of the cabinet provides a vibration-free environment for the crossover. The outside world can view the crossover electronics through a 6.5″ x 4″ clear plastic window that’s pierced by the single pair of high-quality binding posts.

As Paolo Tezzon tells it, the Maxima Amator is a product planned years ago but executed only when certain manufacturing problems had been solved. “The two main volumes are divided by a brace placed obliquely,” he explained. “On the one hand, it helps to avoid the creation of standing waves inside the enclosure by adding a non-parallel wall; on the other, it prevents the solid slabs of wood from moving too much in relation to temperature and humidity changes. Wood is a living material, and the long lateral slabs creating the speaker’s side panels would be, in theory, exposed to the chance of moving if left completely free. Such a design was always in the mind of our founder…but the technology available 30 years ago wouldn’t allow it without the risk of cracking over time. It’s thanks to this construction, to today’s improved solid wood drying techniques, and to advanced compound technologies for producing special glues with a lot of flexibility that we were finally able to turn this old dream into reality.”

The crossover is something new, a configuration developed to more fully exploit the potential advantages of a two-way design that Sonus faber has named “Interactive Fusion Filtering.” The crossover has an accelerated progressive topology, the slope becoming steeper as the frequency moves away from the crossover point. This is an approach that Sonus faber has long utilized. But the Maxima Amator also employs what Tezzon refers to as a “forgotten path in crossover design”—the tweeter and mid/woofer are connected in series, rather than in parallel circuits. “Each driver’s moving coil becomes part of the filtering circuit of the other driver. This potentially leads to a better sonic merging. The Maxima is conceived as a glorification of the two-way design…the two drivers are able to work in a maximally interconnected and organic way.”

I auditioned the Maxima Amators with digital sources, an Oppo BDP-103 for discs and either a Baetis Reference music computer or MusiCHI SRV-1 server to provide standard-resolution and HD audio files. Data streams went to my Ideon Audio Absolute DAC, USB output from the MusiCHI via Ideon’s Master Time USB re-clocker. The DAC fed a Classé Delta PRE connected to either Pass XA 60.8 or David Berning Quadrature Z monoblocks to drive the loudspeakers. Analog cabling was Transparent Gen 5 Ultra; digital wires included Shunyata Research Anaconda (AES/EBU), Revelation Audio (USB), Ideon Audio (USB), and Apogee Wyde Eye (coaxial.) In my 15′ x 15′ room—the ceiling height ranges from 10′ to 12’—bass response was measurably smoothest with the speakers placed 19″ from the front wall, eight feet apart center-to-center, and nine feet from the primary listening position.

With intimately recorded small-ensemble music, the Sonus faber Maxima Amators are second to none in their capacity to provide an intensely involving listening experience. I pulled out a compact disc on the Cedille label I’d not heard in a while, 20^th Century French Wind Trios, eight pieces by composers such as Poulenc, Milhaud, and Ibert, expertly performed by three members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This music can seem slight when performed or recorded indifferently. The Maxima’s highly characteristic reproduction of the tart sound of the oboe, the clarinet’s much mellower sonority, and the bassoon’s resonant bombination helps to underscore that an inspired blending and contrasting of these disparate instrumental timbres is common to all the music on the program. Likewise, listening to the affably off-kilter pieces on Brad Mehldau’s Highway Rider, captured in a warm, close, and (intentionally, one assumes) airless sound, the sense of joyous collaboration that’s behind all good chamber music, and small-group jazz comes through loud and clear. The loudspeakers keep the recording and playback processes essentially invisible.

So long as the primary goal isn’t to rattle the china, symphonic music can yield similar results. My two favorite works for cello and orchestra are Dvorˇák’s B minor Concerto and Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote. Both receive moving performances from Mischa Maisky, accompanied by Zubin Mehta and the Berlin Philharmonic, on a DG concert recording released in 2003. The tone of Maisky’s Montagnana cello is beautifully characterized, and the defining aspects of the two composers’ very different approaches to orchestration are lucidly presented. The Maximas are fast, too. An early recording from pianist Lang Lang on the Telarc label includes a performance of Balakirev’s finger-busting Islamey, played with fearless abandon by the then-18-year-old virtuoso. There’s no smearing of the passagework, despite the velocity of Lang Lang’s playing, and, again, no sense of the music moving from driver to driver as the soloist shifts from one end of the keyboard to the other.

How do these transducers, so capable when it comes to musical nuance, detail, texture, and color do with larger-scale material more dependent on loudness, impact, and low-frequency power? That depends on several factors, including your room and amplification—the virtues of the Maxima Amator described to this point were equally evident with tubed and solid-state amps—and, most critically, your listening habits. If you put a high value on center-of-the earth bass and dynamics that can pin your ears back, the Maximas may not be “enough” with some music. There will be a temptation to keep raising the playback level until a line is crossed, and the sound begins to harden. Similarly, you can add a subwoofer—I experimented with my Magico S-Sub—but this, too, must be done with a gentle touch lest you end up with the kind of disembodied bass you hear from the jukebox at the corner bar. If you can settle for 80% of your idealized expectations when it comes to loud and low, you’ll be richly rewarded. If not…well, you may need to look elsewhere.

For $15,000, there are a lot of highly accomplished alternatives; one is Sonus faber’s Olympica Nova III, positively reviewed in Issue 309. Priced at $1500 less than the Maxima Amator, it’s a more versatile speaker—a three-way, four-driver model that also happens to be pretty easy on the eyes. Paolo Tezzon is cognizant of the tension created between two of his brand’s product offerings. “The Maxima’s customer is different than the Nova’s,” he told me. “Maxima was clearly not created to compete with Nova, but to address the needs of the kind of customer who is an ‘aficionado’ of two-way designs and is well-aware that his quest for purity and coherence entails renouncing a little bit of extension in the low frequencies and in dynamic impact.” If that describes your outlook, don’t hesitate to give the Maxima Amators an extended listen. Owning these Italian beauties is not something you’re ever likely to regret.

Specs & Pricing

Type: Two-way ported loudspeaker
Driver complement: One 1.1″ soft dome tweeter, one 6.5″ fiber mid/woofer
Frequency response: 35Hz–35kHz
Sensitivity: 88dB
Nominal impedance: 4 ohms
Recommended amplifier power: 25–125W
Dimensions: 11.8″ x 44.1″ x 13.8″
Weight: 83.7 lbs.
Price: $15,000