The Sonus Faber Olympica Nova 1 ($6500/pair) is the company’s latest stand-mounted, two-way monitor—a lineage that began with their first speaker, the Minima, which I reviewed some 24 years ago. Like the products that followed, the Minima featured a 1″ silk-dome tweeter and a 4″ reflex-loaded paper-based midbass driver, both attached to a leather-covered baffle and housed in a beautiful wood cabinet, hand-crafted in Italy. I enjoyed the Minima’s sound, as did this magazine’s Sam Tellig, who praised its “sweet, forgiving, slightly rolled-off on top, and somewhat ripe . . . mid-to-upper bass,” with superb focus and imaging that was a “treat for sore ears.”
I recalled fondly that tiny monitor’s imaging and midrange smoothness, so when offered the chance to review the Minima’s 2019 descendent, I readily accepted.
Design
The Olympica Nova 1 was designed by Sonus Faber’s Paolo Tezzon and shares many features with the $15,900/pair Guarneri Tradition so well described in John Atkinson’s March 2018 review. For example, the Olympica Nova 1’s newly designed cabinet walls are made from eight thin, cross-grained layers of wood, pressed together and bonded, then covered by several layers of lacquer to create a more rigid structure. The cabinet sides are asymmetrical, with minimal parallel walls. The front and top have the same veneer as the cabinet sides. There’s leather on the bottom and, of course, on the speaker’s distinctly shaped driver-mount area.
The Olympica Nova 1’s drivers are also new and include a silk-dome tweeter with an apex-damping mechanism said to reduce antiphase distortion. The 5.9″ midbass driver has an air-dried cellulose-pulp cone and a powerful neodymium magnet, and is set into a die-cast aluminum basket. The midbass unit is reflex-loaded with a vertically aligned slotted port that runs the entire height of the speaker, bordered by a finned aluminum extrusion. Reportedly, the combination of slot and adjacent fins strengthens and stabilizes the cabinet as well as reducing port-air turbulence by facilitating smoother airflow. The slotted port is offset on the rear of the non-symmetrical enclosure, and the left and right speakers are handed: The Nova 1s can be set up with their ports aimed toward the inside or outside. Two pairs of speaker binding posts are mounted next to the reflex port.
The speaker’s drivers are crossed over at 2.5 kHz using what Sonus Faber describes as their Paracross circuitry, constructed with proprietary capacitors. In his review of the Guarneri Tradition, Atkinson described the Paracross design as differing from “a conventional CLC, third-order crossover in moving the second series capacitor to the other side of the drive-unit, so that that cap shares the ground connection with the shunt inductor.”
As with other Sonus Faber loudspeakers, the Olympica Nova 1 has as its grille a row of acoustically inert elastic strings, tied at either end with a metal bar whose ends can be slotted into holes in the speaker’s front baffle, top and bottom. According to Sonus Faber, years ago the Museo del violino in Cremona asked the company’s founder, Franco Serblin, to loan a Sonus Faber loudspeaker to the museum to be exhibited with the violins and violas. Serblin created a special version of the Guarneri loudspeaker in the shape of a violin, with an elastic-string grille that resembled the instrument’s strings—and since then that design has been applied to all models.
The Olympica Nova 1 is held firmly to its optional steel stand ($1200/pair) by two accessory screws; the stand’s central pillar is finned in the manner of the extrusion fitted to the speaker’s slotted port. The stand’s bottom plate may be fitted with four of Sonus Faber’s Silent Spikes, used elsewhere in the SF line.
Setup
I secured the Olympica Nova 1s to their stands, oriented so that their ports fired to the outsides. Without spikes, the stands are 27″ high, placing the tweeter centers 38″ above the floor. That forced me to sit more upright than usual in order to hear the maximal high-frequency output from the tweeters’ axes—something I noted while listening to the dual-mono pink-noise track on the Stereophile Editor’s Choice CD (CD, Stereophile STPH016-2). The central image was appropriately narrow and focused. However, the treble dropped off when I sat lower or leaned to either side. (By comparison, in my room, the sweet spot of the KEF LS50 was wider and thus more forgiving of my seated position.)