Without doubt, Sonus Faber is the most prestigious and best known of all the high-end Italian loudspeaker brands. The company is particularly and justifiably renowned for superb construction and finish and also the musical qualities of most of its speakers, which in some cases are little short of legendary. Domus is the entry level Sonus Faber range and the Grand Piano is the top model from the line-up.

It is a four-driver, three-way, floorstanding column. The tweeter is Sonus Faber's customised 25mm ring radiator unit, with a prominent central diffuser. The two identical bass units are 180mm doped paper cone drivers and the midrange is a smaller version of the same thing, this time with a 150mm cone and a nominal coverage between 400Hz-3.6kHz.

This means that the whole of the midband in effect is covered by a single unit. It is quite common for three-way systems to use a much lower treble crossover frequency, so the upper midband will to some extent be disturbed by the treble crossover, depending in part on crossover design.

In this case, the crossover uses compound slopes - first order initially, though the final attenuation rate is not specified in this instance.

The real head turner, however, is not the drive unit complement, or the large front mounted reflex port - used to tune the enclosure somewhere around 32Hz by our reckoning. Instead, it's the enclosure itself, which is a typically extravagant, Sonus Faber creation.

Although this model is from the entry level range, we are dealing with a beautifully constructed, heavy enclosure with a cross section said to mirror that of a lute - it is wider at the front, narrow at the back and has outward bowed side panels.

The front, top and rear panels are covered in real black leather (not leatherette as in some accounts), which is used to apply surface damping and helps control diffraction with its textured surface.

It also serves yet another purpose by helping guarantee a good pneumatic seal around the drivers. The sides consist of what appear to be resiliently mounted panels. These use horizontally arranged staves of wood, which are glued together and then highly polished.

Our test pair were supplied in the teak option with a horizontal grain structure, but there's also a nice piano black lacquer finish available.

Angle tweaking

The enclosure sits on an overhanging steel plinth which provides the wide wheelbase required for stability and of course, anchor points for carpet piercing spikes. These have enough adjustment available for some useful tweaking of the speaker's angle of attack.

What you end up with is an unusually elegant tall column, with no hard edges and a very organic shape, enhanced more than a little aesthetically by the unusual grain orientation of the side panels and by the leather trim. But this is not a loudspeaker that sets out to give the user an easy ride.....

This is in most respects an utterly wonderful and beguiling loudspeaker, but it is not without foibles and criticism. It's not too hard to see just which strings are being pulled and how.

First and foremost, we had some difficulty in determining appropriate positioning. Used with a wide baseline, the speaker sounded phasey and back near a rear wall, the sound was soft and recessive.

The optimum turned out to be with the speakers pulled well forward from the back wall, relatively close together and toed-in so that they were pointing directly at the listening hotseat. Vertical orientation is possible using the adjustable feet, and this should also should be tweaked with some care.