Sound quality
The great thing about a speaker of this
size is that it’s possible to make it usefully efficient and so the Venere 2.5
proved. With a quoted sensitivity of 89dB, you don’t need a direct feed to
Didcot power station to tickle its transducers. I auditioned it with two
amplifiers – the new solid-state Musical Fidelity M6 500 integrated and a
not-so new World Audio K5881 tube amp fed direct from the variable output of an
Audiolab M-DAC. In both instances, these speakers were well able to communicate
the relative differences in sonic character between the amps (and there sure is
a difference), telling me that they weren’t interfering too much with the
signal sent to them. This can only be a good thing…
Sonus
Faber Venere 2.5 loudspeaker
The speaker proved relatively easy to
set-up, with no strange rituals required. It certainly wasn’t anywhere as
sensitive to toe-in as some of the other speakers I’ve had in my listing room
recently, such as the MartinLogan Montis, for example. Just a few degrees of
angling towards ‘the couch of revelation’ (i.e. my sofa upon which I do the
listening) saw them imaging very nicely indeed. The only issue (if that’s not
too strong a term) was the distance from the rear wall, which needed to be a
little more than many floor standers I audition in my room. The Venere 2.5
needed to come out a good 25cm, lest its bass wasn’t boomy – many speakers I’ve
tried work closer to the back wall, I’ve found.
Properly set up, the Venere 2.5 gives a
wide, smooth and spacious sound. As you’d expect at the price (And considering
its junior status in a very prestigious range which spans up to the heavens in
pricing terms) it’s not quite as delicate, incisive and subtle as its bigger
brothers, but it still retains very large amounts of Sonus Faber character in
the way it behaves. This of course is no bad thing. Feed this speaker some
pulsating pop, and it dives into it with the aplomb of something that’s had an
energy drink or three too many – there’s plenty of emotion and brio. Yet hit if
with some contemplative classical and it steps back respectfully and quietly
decants the sherry, as if it’s aware of the deference it needs to show such
programmer material. Clever, that.
With
a quoted sensitivity of 89dB, you don’t need a direct feed to Didcot power
station to tickle its transducers
Tonally it is generally closer to the deep,
dark, sultry school of speaker design that a great many modern boxes. You’d
never call it dull, but neither is it from the ‘blow your wig off’ school of
speaker design. The tweeter is a nice delicate device; inferior treble units
have an amazing ability to spoil things lower down the frequency spectrum and
lop the bite from the leading edges of instruments but this does not. Ride
cymbals on Caravan’s Nine Feet Underground track were very well carried indeed,
although there’s a little less top end sparkle and nuance than you’d get from a
speaker with a good ribbon such as Monitor Audio’s GX200.
All three drivers integrate well – it’s a
two-and-a-half-way design but it gives the impression of being cast from solid.
This means that while the speaker is able to tell you all about the vivid
attack transients from the steel guitar strumming on – for example – Tears for
Fear’s Pale Shelter, it’s doesn’t lacerate your lugholes, leaving you dripping
blood on the carpet. And moving to valve amplification smoothed things even
more of course, making for a magically mellow listening experience, even with
shouty modern digital re-masters.
Cabinet
detailing is lovely – even the binding posts are finished like jewellery
Although the Venere 2.5 is a peppy
loudspeaker, it gets its speed not from an artificially edgy tonal balance, but
from high quality drive units which are faster than a Britney Spears wedding
and held back very little by those capacious cabinets. For this reason, these
loudspeakers excel through the mid band. True, they’re not totally transparent
– you’d never confuse them for a MartinLogan CLX for example but you can
forgive the very slight opacity of those Curv drivers lend to the sound because
they are basically accurate and consistent. This makes it easy for the ear to
tune in to them, and for the brain to tune them out. Kate Bush’s The Big Sky is
relatively compresses, but really gets going as she gives her lyrics both
barrels towards the end of the song. The Venere 2.5 proved well able to impact
the subtle dynamic contrasts in the song, hanging things together beautifully
as the song, progressively gets more complex, without descending into any hint
of hardness or muddle. Indeed detailing was generally very good, the Sonus
fabers proving well able to spotlight Johny Marr’s deft rhythm guitar work on
The Smiths’ Headmaster Ritual. And they scythed through the mix to throw up
plenty of detail about the backing guitar tracks. I also found myself very
pleased with the way they handled vocals, showing not a sign of nasality or
edge – they were nicely balanced and let the emotion in Morrissey’s plaintive
voice shine through. The result was an engaging, sometimes mesmeric performance
that totally belied the fact that I was listening to a mid-priced pair of
loudspeakers.
