Sonus Faber Lumina II
Contents
Italian design… you have to love it. Franco Serblin founded Sonus Faber in 1983. His first creation – besides the Snail from 1980 – was the Parva. And until about 1998, Sonus Faber only made monitor speakers. By the way, a definite design shift came around 2010. That’s one year after the acquisition by Fine Sounds.
The Lumina is Sonus Faber’s entry-level speaker. This Lumina II is a two-way monitor with a remarkably large 29mm soft-dome DAD tweeter. A 15cm woofer picks up the mid and low end. Crossover is at 1800 Hz. The overall range, like the Focal, is 55 Hz – 24 kHz. That’s pretty normal for a speaker in this class. The Price is 1100 Euros per pair; without stands.
The Sound
How well this speaker plays! And remarkably, it goes well on all amplifiers. The Pass can show its power, scale and control, the Yamaha can show its nimbleness and neutrality and the NuPrime throws its delicious glow over everything. The Lumina shows it off remarkably well. Very impressive.
There is one but. The bump in the high frequencies does strike us both a bit. As soon as Jacques hits the cymbals, we hear that they are just a bit too loud. Is that a bad thing? Mwah. It is a pity, but not a disaster. We rather don’t think it’s necessary, because these Sonus Fabers already play so well by themselves. So why do they need a sauce over them? Taste…
Of the three candidates this is the only speaker that plays well on all amplifiers. And that shows something. And that teaches us a lesson. It is namely the speaker with – without a doubt – the lowest distortion. We believe that a very good amplifier also magnifies errors. And here there is not much to magnify… Hats off to Sonus Faber. Nice work.
Measurements
Sonus Faber gets to go home with the 1st prize when it comes to good distortion measurements. Those are just incredibly low with the Lumina. And we guess that this is also the reason that the Lumina plays just fine on all amplifiers.
What we do see is an obvious tuning. The high is really boosted and we find that a bit unfortunate, because the Lumina does not need that at all; it is a good speaker! So why commercial tuning? Anyway… neat results.