Opera loudspeakers is part of a sizeable hi-fi manufacturing operation based just outside Treviso, in the north-east corner of Italy.

Opera itself is a specialist speaker brand, but shares premises, ownership and distribution with the Unison operation, which makes both solid-state and valve-equipped electronics components. The factory isn't far from the HQ of that other UKD stablemate Pathos, whose Digit CD player is tested next month.

The Seconda might be positioned a bit above the budget price mainstream, but at the very least the extra outlay buys you an attractive finish and an interesting shape.

Available in cherry, mahogany or piano black, the curved sides of the Seconda expand immediately behind the front baffle, and then taper to a slightly narrower back. This is pleasing to the eye, and also helps to avoid focusing internal horizontal standing waves. The front and rear panels, as well as the top, are all covered in leather that looks and feels good, while adding a modicum of damping.

If the finish and presentation of these speakers is unusual, so too is the bass-loading technique. This is a sealed-box speaker, a type that has an illustrious history, but is rarely seen these days, as the overwhelming majority of today's speakers are reflex loaded, (or its close relation, the transmission line).

Port-loading has the apparent advantage of producing more bass output 'for free', through the tuned resonance of the reflex port augmenting the output of the speaker system. However, one has to wonder whether a two-and-a-half-way design, which already has an additional drive unit to supply extra bass, has any real need for ports that do the same job rather less effectively.

The port output might be a freebie, but it comes with some unwanted baggage, such as the one-note tendency of any tuned port versions, a scrambling of phase relationships, and a steeper (12dB/octave) ultimate roll-off rather than the 6dB/octave that applies when the enclosure is a sealed box.

The enclosure here is divided in half, so that each cone driver operates in its own sub-enclosure, and the sides have some extra stiffening.

Sourced from Norwegian specialist SEAS, the two main drivers here look identical, both having 180mm cast alloy frames and 125mm aluminium alloy cones. The tweeter is also a SEAS unit, using a 25mm fabric dome diaphragm.