Напольная акустика — Aries Cerat Aurora

The Aurora is a partially active three-way horn loudspeaker from the Greek company Aries Cerat, first demonstrated at Munich High End in May 2022. Its bass and midbass section runs from an internal amplifier, while the horn midrange and dipole horn tweeter are driven passively, and the whole system is shaped in a sculptural Art Deco form built around a bass cube.

Key specs that matter

Four 12 inch paper cone woofers sit in the cube and reach down to 30 Hz. The bass module has a sensitivity of 100 dB/W and its own 250 W amplifier, which can be bypassed on the fly without modification. A midrange compression driver covers 280 Hz to 3,000 Hz, and a ribbon tweeter takes over from 3 kHz upward. The midrange unit is a bespoke driver that Aries Cerat also uses in its Contendo speaker system.

Engineering and use context

The cube is made of solid aluminium with 25 mm sides and places the four woofers on different axes in a hybrid open baffle arrangement. Its semi-open back presents an area slightly smaller than the total moving cone surface, so the drivers work against some back pressure while efficiency stays high. The woofers come from an outside specialist manufacturer and use light cones with linear surround suspension to reach the upper midbass. The midrange horn uses a swirl transition to sit on the cube, a geometry chosen because it minimised diffraction points. It combines a 45 cm body and a 15 cm solid aluminium end flare, assembled as stacked ply and milled on a 5-axis machine, with walls at least 10 cm thick and 5 cm in the aluminium section. The tweeter is a flatfoil ribbon of pure aluminium with no former or carrier, loaded by a dipole horn - fifteen flares were designed, built, measured and discarded along the way. The compression driver sits at the centre of the cube, offset to the rear, so the system is time aligned on all three axes and acts as a coaxial source. Filtering stays in the analogue domain, with passive components, multi-tap attenuation transformers, passive line filters and relay switching, and bass and midrange levels can be adjusted from a Bluetooth app without any DSP or active filters.

Pairing

The high efficiency allows a low-power amplifier, including single-ended valve designs, to drive the horn section, while the internal amplifier handles the woofers. Aries Cerat has not published an impedance figure, so the load has to be confirmed with the maker.

Alternatives

The Aries Cerat Symphonia is a single-chassis three-way horn speaker, 130 cm high and 170 kg, with a tractrix bass horn and a rated efficiency of 101 dB.