Полочная акустика — Opera Loudspeakers Opera Prima

The Opera Prima is a compact two-way bookshelf speaker from Opera Loudspeakers, the Italian maker based in Treviso that was founded in 1989. The company traces its origins to the early 1980s, to a partnership between an Italian and an English audiophile. This is the original Prima as revised in 2015, a model later followed by a v2 version with different drivers and specifications.

Key specs that matter

A 6.5 inch woofer sits in a reflex-loaded enclosure of about 10 litres internal volume and hands over to the tweeter at 2000 Hz. Both filters in the crossover are 12 dB per octave slopes, a low pass for the woofer and a high pass for the tweeter. Opera rates the frequency response at 40 Hz to 20,000 Hz and the sensitivity at 91 dB measured at 2.83 V and 1 m. Nominal impedance is 4 ohm and the power rating is 70 W RMS. The quoted weight of 19 kg applies to the pair, so each cabinet weighs around 9.5 kg.

Engineering and use context

Opera makes the enclosure out of 25 mm MDF, a thick panel for a cabinet of only 10 litres, and its edges are rounded. The side panels are veneered in real wood and then finely polished, and the Prima was offered with a black ash option among its veneers, which follows the furniture-grade finish that Opera applies across its range. Second-order slopes at a single point make for a simple crossover with few parts in the signal path. Since the cabinet is small, the speaker is suited to a stand or a sturdy shelf in a room of about 20 m2, and the reflex port needs some free air around it. The drivers are a single woofer and a single tweeter, with no midrange unit, so the whole band below the crossover is carried by the woofer. The later Prima v2 moved to custom Scan-Speak drivers, a 180 mm woofer with a 2500 Hz crossover and a 6 ohm rating, and was later sold as the top bookshelf of the Classica line, so the two generations should not be confused, because their figures differ.

Pairing

Opera states that the low nominal load can be driven by many amplifiers, either valve or solid state. With this sensitivity, a few watts go a long way in a domestic setting, and the power rating caps the amplifier size. Low-power valve integrated amplifiers are therefore a sensible partner, if their output stage is at ease with this load.

Alternatives

The Opera Callas is a larger bookshelf model from the same maker, pairing a 7 inch woofer with a Scanspeak tweeter in a rear-ported cabinet.