Floorstanding loudspeakers — Acora Acoustics VRC

The VRC is the three-way granite tower of Acora Acoustics, and its name is taken from the initials of the company founder, Valerio Renato Cora, whose family has worked in dimension stone for more than 50 years. Acora was set up in Toronto in 2018, and the VRC made its public debut in February 2023 at the Florida International Audio Expo. Its asking price was USD 218,000 per pair.

Key specs that matter

Five drivers sit on each baffle in a 3-way bass reflex system. A 34 mm beryllium dome tweeter is flanked by two 4.5 inch midrange units, and a pair of 12 inch woofers runs in parallel over the same band below them. Acora rates the speaker at 4 ohm with an efficiency of 94 dB at 1 W and 1 m and a frequency response of 18 Hz to 50 kHz, and it accepts amplifiers from 10 W up to 400 W. Each cabinet measures about 47 cm wide, 133 cm high and 53 cm deep, and weighs about 195 kg, a figure that shifts with the stone chosen.

Engineering and use context

Each enclosure is glued together from six slabs of 30 mm granite, CNC machined to tolerances under 0.1 mm and bonded with an epoxy-based adhesive that Valerio Cora developed himself. The top of the cabinet tapers to about 20 by 30 cm. Inside there is no bracing - the box is a single chamber, and each midrange driver gets its own hardened carbon-fibre enclosure, while carbon-fibre twill is used as damping. The midrange units come from Scan-Speak and are modified in-house, and the tweeter is built to Acora's specification by a small German firm, with the larger dome chosen to push its resonance lower than that of a typical 26 mm unit. Mids and tweeter form a D'Appolito array. A fourth-order electrical crossover divides the bands, and its circuit boards are printed for each batch of parts to allow for production tolerances. Two 51 mm reflex ports face the rear, and the speaker stands on a T6 aluminium outrigger with integral spikes. Buyers choose among six standard stones, from Nero Assoluto and Black Galaxy to Steel Grey, Mystic Grey, Emerald Green Pearl and Blue Pearl, while three rarer stones - Mari Blue, Lilac Purple and Sunset Fire - come as limited upgrades.

Pairing

The high efficiency means the VRC does not depend on very large amplifiers, and the design brief was that it should not need extreme power to work properly. Even so, the low nominal load is best driven by a transistor design that stays stable into low impedance.

Alternatives

The Acora SRC-2 is a smaller granite floorstander that combines a pair of 7 inch paper cones with a beryllium dome in a 2.5-way arrangement.