Напольная акустика — Sonoro GRAND ORCHESTRA

The GRAND ORCHESTRA is a passive floorstanding speaker from sonoro audio GmbH, a German company, and it is the tall passive tower of the brand's Orchestra family, a group of design-led loudspeakers aimed at living rooms. sonoro set its suggested price at EUR 1,999 per pair when the model arrived, and the cabinets come in two matte colours, black or white, each trimmed with black aluminium details.

Key specs that matter

sonoro chose a 2.5-way bass reflex system. Two 6 inch woofers with polyethylene-coated paper cones sit in die-cast baskets and are driven by double magnet motors, while the treble is handled by an AMT (Air Motion Transformer) ribbon tweeter with a neodymium magnet. sonoro rates the frequency range at 38 Hz to 32 kHz, the nominal impedance at 4 ohm and the efficiency at 87.5 dB. Each cabinet measures 989 mm tall without its feet and 1,042 mm with them, 210 mm wide at the body, 280 mm across the feet and 349 mm deep, and one speaker weighs 24.8 kg.

Engineering and use context

With this driver arrangement the pair of woofers work together at low frequencies, and just one carries on up into the midrange before the AMT takes over, so the upper cone works alongside the ribbon and the lower cone adds low-frequency output. The crossover was tuned by sonoro with timing and even coverage across the listening area in mind. Two flow-optimised reflex openings are placed on the rear panel rather than the front baffle. The wooden enclosures are sanded by hand and then given their matte finish, and the maker states that the cabinet geometry was chosen to limit standing waves and panel resonances. Edges are rounded, and the driver cones sit flush in the baffle with no visible screws, which keeps the front clean even with the grilles removed. The double magnet motors on the woofers concentrate more magnetic force in the gap than a single ring of the same size, and the die-cast baskets are stiffer than pressed steel frames, so the cones are held in a rigid structure. The integrated feet widen the stance, which adds stability to a tall and fairly light tower on hard floors.

Pairing

sonoro recommends amplifiers delivering between 50 and 170 W per channel. Since the nominal load is low and the efficiency is moderate, a transistor amplifier rated into low impedances is the safest match, and the upper end of that power window gives headroom in a 20 m2 space. The rear reflex ports mean the towers should stand a little away from the rear wall, and the port openings should not be blocked by furniture or curtains.

Alternatives

Within the same range, the sonoro ORCHESTRA Shaped Signature is a three-way floorstander tuned together with Karl-Heinz Fink.