Time for some towers. In recent months, a succession of standmount speakers has passed through my listening room: GoldenEar BRXes, Bowers & Wilkins 705 Signatures, Marten Oscar Duos, original KEF LS50s, and the new LS50 Metas. All these loudspeakers sounded excellent, though different from one another. I felt that a floorstanding loudspeaker would make for an interesting change.
Italian company Sonus Faber is primarily known for its high-performance, relatively high-priced designs, like the $130,000/pair Aida that Michael Fremer reviewed in October 2018 or the $15,900/pair Guarneri Tradition, which I reviewed in June 2018. In the fall of 2020, Sonus Faber announced an affordable series, the Luminas. I asked for a pair of the Lumina III towers, which cost $2199/pair, for review.
The Lumina III
Sonus Faber explains that the word “Lumina”—Latin for “to brighten” or “to illuminate”—is a contraction formed from “Luxury Sound Experience” (LU), “Minimalist Design” (MIN), and “Natural Sound” (NA). The “Natural Sound” will have to wait for the results of my auditioning, but with respect to “Luxury Sound Experience,” the Lumina III is a slim, elegant tower standing 38″ tall on its spikes. The spikes are necessary to provide clearance for the reflex port, which fires downward from the speaker’s base. (Metal discs are provided for those who don’t want the spikes to damage their floors.) The enclosure is clad in a black leather wrap, while the front baffle is a 10mm-thick sheet of plywood finished in dark brown, called wengè, with inlaid horizontal maple stripes. A cloth-over-plastic-frame grille is supplied.
The four drive-units are mounted vertically in-line on the baffle, each outlined with chrome. At the top is Sonus Faber’s Damped Apex Dome (DAD) tweeter, the same unit featured in the company’s Sonetto series. The point of a tiny damping cone is held against the center of the hand-coated silk dome by a vertical bracket, which is said to optimize the driver’s dispersion.
The 5″ midrange unit, which operates between 350Hz and 3.5kHz, is also the same as that used in the Sonetto speakers. It uses a cone formed from cellulose pulp blended with other natural fibers and a diecast basket described by the manufacturer with the phrase “ultra-free compression.” The two 5″ woofers, which are new in the Lumina speakers, feature paper-pulp cones, rubber-roll surrounds, and those “ultra-free compression” baskets.
“Minimalist Design” refers to the speaker’s physical design, to its claimed ease of setup, and to the crossover, which uses Sonus Faber’s “Paracross topology,” described in my Guarneri Tradition review. The crossover features Sonus Faber–branded, “high-quality” capacitors. Electrical connection is via two pairs of nickel-plated binding posts inset on the rear panel, allowing for biwiring.
Setup
I initially placed the Sonus Fabers where standmounted speakers have worked best in my slightly asymmetrical room, but the midbass was lighter in weight than I expected, and the upper bass was somewhat exaggerated. After some experimentation, I ended up with the Lumina IIIs 7″ closer to the wall behind them, which brought the upper- and low bass into better balance; the two steps up to a vestibule behind the right-hand speaker didn’t allow me to move the Sonus Fabers any closer. Each speaker’s front baffle was 70″ from the wall behind it. The woofers of the left-hand Lumina III were 31″ from the LPs that line the nearest sidewall; the right-hand speaker’s woofers were 40″ from the bookshelves that line its sidewall. I didn’t use the grilles.
Each speaker was supported on its spikes, which meant that the opening of the downward-firing port was about three-quarters of an inch from the carpet beneath. My ears were just above the Lumina IIIs’ tweeters, which were 35″ from the floor.
The music source was mainly the Grimm MU1 streamer that I reviewed in the March 2021 issue, sending upsampled AES/EBU data to an MBL N31 DAC (although I also used the N31 to play CDs and dual-layer SACDs). Amplification was the Pass Labs XP-32 preamplifier, which I also reviewed in the March issue, and a pair of Parasound Halo JC 1+ monoblocks.
Listening
Once I had finalized the speakers’ positions, I started my serious listening. As always, I started my critical auditioning of the Lumina IIIs with the test-tone files I created for my Editor’s Choice CD (Stereophile STPH016-2). The Lumina IIIs were initially toed in to the listening position. With the dual-mono pink noise track, the treble balance was reminiscent of the Bowers & Wilkins 705 Signature’s: a little accentuated in the top two octaves, especially when compared with the KEFs. I increased the toe-in a little so that the speaker axes crossed just in front of me; now the high frequencies sounded in better balance with the midrange, though still a little high in level, especially if I sat upright so I could see the tops of the speakers. While the pink noise had a touch of “character” in the lower midrange, the image of the pink noise was narrow and stable, with no “splashing” to the sides at any frequency.
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COMPANY INFO
Sonus Faber S.p.A.
US distributor: Sumiko
655 Wedgwood Rd. North, Suite 115
Maple Grove, MN 55311
(510) 843-4500
sumikoaudio.net
ARTICLE CONTENTS
Page 1
Page 2
Specifications
Associated Equipment
Measurements
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