Sonoro wants change: business is booming with easygoing sound systems for carefree everyday listening, but that success has somewhat stood in the way of the company’s reputation as a serious hi-fi manufacturer. The Orchestra Shaped Signature is here to thoroughly clean up the second half of that sentence.
Truth be told, nobody had really complained. Over the years, Sonoro has brought a whole series of speakers into our listening room that consistently won us over with clean performance and a pleasantly unpretentious attitude. But the company from Neuss decided that, especially with its speakers, it wanted to move a bit away from lifestyle furniture that “just so happens” to sound really good, and more toward serious hi-fi equipment that also just so happens to look fantastic as lifestyle décor.
So a more sonically ambitious approach was needed, which is why Sonoro turned to none other than Karl-Heinz Fink. He promptly took the company’s basket of existing components and design principles apart piece by piece, thoroughly dissecting and scrutinizing everything to determine what could stay as it was and where there was room for refinement.
The fact that the Sonoro Orchestra Shaped Signature still unmistakably looks like a Sonoro speaker – with its familiar cabinet shape, recognizable cone drivers, and tried-and-true AMT tweeter – already shows that Fink considered the foundation sound. The slim design language with its slightly angled baffle and cabinet top remains, as does the matte white (or matte black) finish – and that’s a good thing: compact, charming, and refined, these sound columns never impose visually, yet they remain something your eyes keep returning to. Only a small, discreet “Signature” script near the lower rear corner of the side panel reveals exactly what we’re dealing with here.
Still – after all, the man’s reputation isn’t accidental – Fink found dozens of details he wanted to tweak, modify, or completely rethink. So he and his team got straight to work, starting with the woofers: the fundamentals were already solid, but Fink wasn’t entirely satisfied with the motor structure, so the drivers received a new magnet system. Most notably, an aluminum ring now linearizes inductance across the entire excursion range, ensuring that the voice coil always sees the same magnetic field even during extreme excursions.
Unlike something like the Grand Orchestra, the Shaped Signature is not a 2.5-way but a true 3-way design, with the upper cone driver bowing out below around 200 hertz. Eagle-eyed observers will notice the double-folded textile surround, though that’s naturally not the only difference – outwardly, the resemblance is essentially the only thing the drivers share. A midrange driver inherently requires an entirely different set of Thiele-Small parameters than a bass driver, after all, since it operates in a completely different frequency range. The special surround primarily features exceptionally low hysteresis and very low losses, making the driver wonderfully quick and highly responsive.
In general, energy preservation was a key concept in the design of the new speakers. Karl-Heinz Fink is not a fan of overdamping speaker cabinets – not even when it comes to the dreaded standing waves inside the enclosure. In the Orchestra Shaped Signature, a resonator tuned to the problem frequency handles the standing wave, allowing the software-optimized internal damping to focus only on the comparatively manageable remaining vibrations.
The familiar Air Motion Transformer has essentially remained unchanged as well – but the way it integrates with the midrange follows a completely different philosophy than before, when the crossover transition was designed to be as gradual as possible. Previously, a waveguide adapted the tweeter’s dispersion pattern to match the woofers, while a deliberately shallow filter slope created a broad, homogeneous transition. Fink strongly dislikes placing waveguides in front of tweeters, and so the horn is gone on the Signature: if the driver wants to radiate broadly, it should be allowed to do so freely. AMTs in particular sound airier and more relaxed without a guide, according to Fink. As you can see, the principle of allowing the speaker to sing as freely and unrestrained as possible runs like a red thread through the entire design. He solves the integration issue simply by choosing a crossover frequency where the 5-inch midrange driver still doesn’t beam too much, though the crossover itself is steep in order not to overburden the tweeter and unnecessarily provoke distortion. The completely redesigned crossover therefore uses a fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley topology, attenuating the tweeter at 24 decibels per octave. At first glance that sounds like a huge part count, but some can be omitted by incorporating the cabinet’s acoustic filtering behavior into the design – allowing the desired slope without burying 381 components in the crossover network.
I already mentioned that the result of this rejuvenation still looks like a Sonoro speaker – it also retains the classic Sonoro proportions, which admittedly makes it seem a little lost in our roughly 600-square-foot listening room. Normally we outsource listening tests for speakers of this size to the much smaller living rooms of our contributors, but when Sonoro marketing manager Miriam Benning and Karl-Heinz Fink arrived at our facility with the new creations in tow, they didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the room dimensions.
“Well, let’s just see how they’ll handle this,” we thought, and started with Boris Blank’s “Magnetic Lies” from the album Convergence, recorded with singer Malia. After just a few seconds, I hit the stop button, incredulous glances wandered toward Fink, who commented with a sly smirk: “Well, just because they’re small doesn’t mean they can’t do bass” – as though the laws of physics only apply to his work on an optional basis. The way these compact towers with their two pairs of 5-inch woofers control our room is genuinely astonishing. Further tests ranging from Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” (Rumours) with its powerful kick drum to “Deep Blue” from Ladytron’s Velocifero with its massive synth bass line confirm that Fink’s principle of energy preservation clearly translates into tangible performance gains.
Of course, music is not just bass, so I explored every other corner of the frequency spectrum with Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and came away very satisfied: all the little scratching and rasping noises happening beside the music proper are cleanly separated from the overall presentation, while the plucked violin strings shortly before the three-minute mark burst into the room with delightful plasticity. All of this happens with a certain refined restraint that nevertheless always reveals even the slightest bit of information. It quickly becomes apparent that the oversized, room-filling, warmly lush, and intentionally somewhat soft tuning of earlier models has given way to a more honest voicing with more realistic stage dimensions, paired with a muscular presentation full of drive and punch. The presentation does, however, still retain a certain forgiving nature, especially regarding music selection. You can still listen to R.E.M. or the Smashing Pumpkins all day long without worrying about listener fatigue – the gritty, scratchy high-frequency chaos is clearly present, but tamed just enough that it won’t sandblast your brain.
If I had to summarize the change in character compared to previous models in one word, I would choose “involvement.” While earlier Orchestra models were unapologetically cozy crowd-pleasers, the Signatures actively pull the listener into the “music experience.” On No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” (Tragic Kingdom), for example, the diffuse roller-coaster clatter and multilingual announcement voices effectively create atmosphere, after which the diaphragms blast Gwen Stefani’s anger over Disneyland’s commercialization of her hometown Anaheim straight into my face. In the middle of the spectacle, I don’t spend a single second wondering whether the studio quality meets audiophile standards and instead simply let the intensely delivered tirade press me into the sofa.
Clearly – this change was intentional. Sonoro no longer wanted its speakers to sound like its sales hit Meisterstück – after all, that’s what the Meisterstück itself exists for. The Orchestra Shaped Signature takes itself much more seriously as a hi-fi instrument than before, while still remaining perfectly suited for relaxed, effortless listening in the background. I’d say: mission accomplished!
Loudspeaker Sonoro Orchestra Shaped Signature
Concept: passive 3-way floorstanding speaker | Driver complement: 2 × 13 cm woofers, 13 cm midrange driver, AMT tweeter with approx. 85 cm² folded diaphragm area | Frequency response (±6 dB): 35 Hz to 24 kHz | Crossover frequencies: 300 Hz, 2700 Hz | Nominal impedance: 4 Ω (minimum: 3.6 Ω @ 37 Hz) | Sensitivity (2.83 V): 88 dB | Recommended amplifier power: from 50 W | Special features: cone drivers with Kevlar-reinforced paper/bamboo diaphragms, double-folded textile surround on the midrange driver, single-wire terminals, foam plugs for bass reflex ports | Finish: matte white/silver or matte black/black | Weight: 23.8 kg | Dimensions (W/H/D): 18/97/35 cm (28/104/35 cm with stand) | Warranty: 2 years | Price per pair: approx. €3,000
sonoro audio
Hammer Landstraße 45
41460 Neuss
Telephone +49 2131 8834141