Company & Product Overview

This article is on the Sonus Faber Duetto all-in-one powered speaker pair. Sonus Faber set out to make a pair of speakers that would bring their legendary sound to a new audience of people who wanted a good stereo pair of speakers that could stand on their own. Sonus Faber makes some of our favorite speakers — they are both incredibly natural sounding but are also some of the most beautiful speakers you can find. And for good reason, Sonus Faber is an Italian company known for some of the world's best speakers, selling for up to $250,000 a pair. And if you have ever seen a Sonus Faber speaker in person, you know what we mean when we say they have a stunning appearance designed to compliment anyone's home. 

When we first heard about the Duetto we were hoping to get a pair in advance to check out before their official release. Sonus Faber introduced the Omnia, and all in one single powered speaker in early 2022 and we were eager to see how they had applied with what they learned in the Omnia Wireless Speaker System with the new Duetto.

After just a few bars, we can tell you, they have succeeded in bringing that wonderful natural Sonus Faber sound into a speaker that will make a whole new group of music lovers very happy.

Design & Build Quality

With a long history of building some of the most beautiful speakers you will ever see, it is no surprise that the Duetto follows in that heritage. It's also really cool how they incorporated technology needed to make it sound great into the design.

When you look at a Duetto from the top, it looks like the shape of a lute. The beautifully matched veneer walnut finish is even mirror imaged from the front and back. These come in two colors, one is a walnut finish and the other is the walnut painted with a matte graphite finish. The rear of the speaker is sleek with just the innovative port showing. And all of the input and power connections are tucked away in a recessed section on the rear.

Like a lot of their speakers, the top is graced with black Italian leather with the main speaker having touch controls embedded in the leather.

The black grill also looks a bit like a lute and this is one speaker we did prefer the look with the grills on as they are just so elegant.

The Duetto was designed to reach quite deep down into the bass region and as a result is not exactly a tiny speaker. They stand about 14” tall, 11” wide, and 8” deep. They will work best on their dedicated speaker stands, but should also be fine on top of credenza or even in a deep bookcase with the fine-tuning you can do through the web interface.

The Duetto comes with a small remote control and for quick access, you have the Sonus Faber Senso system on top of one speaker. This has a few lighted lines and three buttons that serve several purposes. These allow you to change volume, skip, play/pause, and change sources all from the top of the speaker. There are a lot of possible sources so Sonus Faber color codes each one. We quickly learned the color codes of our favorites. And if you don’t want to see these bars you can dim them or completely turn them off from the remote. We do have to call out the harder-than-normal challenge of putting a battery in the remote. You need a long straight paperclip you insert in a tiny hole, then feel around for a clip inside which will release the cover. Fortunately, you will not need to do this very often, but we hope to see them address this in the future.

Features & Technology

The Duetto has some of the best connectivity we have seen on an all-in-one set of powered speakers. It combines the best of streaming possibilities with wired connection options.

HDMI ARC is becoming pretty common on better-powered speakers and it's here on the Duetto. HDMI ARC allows your TV to send an audio signal down to the unit, but another benefit is your TV remote control then takes over the volume for the Duetto when the TV is the source. All units like this also automatically turn on and select the right input when you turn on the TV. You will want to set your TV to output PCM since this is a two-channel system, but the Duetto will offer a massive improvement for your TV sound.

Vinyl lovers will appreciate the built-in MM phono preamp. And if you are not using the analog inputs with a turntable, you can push a button to make them a standard AUX input for something like a CD player. If your TV does not have an HDMI ARC connection, you can still get TV sound to it using its Toslink optical input.

For streaming services, the Duetto has you covered with Chromecast, Apple Airplay2, Bluetooth AptX HD, with Tidal and Spotify connect on board as well. Roon is present too, which will make Qobuz fans happy that have a Roon subscription.

If you are a fan of voice control, Siri and Google Assistant are supported.

After you get the Duetto on your network, which is a snap, you’ll want to scan the QR code on the back of the manual to bring up a fantastic setup interface. This will let you really dial in the Duettos and allow you to seamlessly blend in a subwoofer as well.

First, there is a very fine adjustment slider for high frequencies. The room we tested ours in was a little live and we found we liked them set at - 1.5 dB. Next is what they call their loudness maximizer. This will boost the bass at very low volumes and decrease that boost as the volume increases. This is exactly how loudness circuits are supposed to work and we like the way they named it.

If you are listening to them off center, there is a balance slider for fine-tuning. They have another feature we love to see on all-in-one speakers. Since the main right speaker comes with all of the inputs, this might be inconvenient if your turntable was on the left side of your cabinet. With the push of a button in the web interface, you can flip the channels. You can also do this with a button on the bottom of the main speaker.

There is a room placement selection for near a wall or away from the wall. This will help the Duetto from getting boomy if it is close to a wall, and with their great deep bass, that is a very important feature to have.

Finally, they have just some fantastic settings for adding a subwoofer. When you tell the web interface you have a subwoofer, more controls will pop up that let you adjust the where the frequency gets removed from the Duettos and goes to the sub. This can make a world of difference in getting them dialed in with a sub and you can go from 50hz to 150hz.

Almost all subs have gain control on their amp in the rear, but for fine-tuning the blend, the interface gives you plus or minus 5db to really get the blend right from your listening position. And if that were not enough, there is even a subwoofer delay of up to 20 milliseconds to let you totally integrate a subwoofer with the Duetto.

Moving over to the components in the speaker that make for its fantastic sound, the Duetto is a two-way system with custom drivers designed by Sonus Faber.

The one inch dome tweeter uses a copper cap and silk dome with a large waveguide to control its directivity. The 4 ½” long throw woofer uses Neodymium magnets and has a coated version of their cellulose diaphragm material specially designed for this application. These are bi-amplified using some serious internal power amps. The amp for the tweeter is a 100 watt per channel class AB amp while the one for the woofer is a 250 watt Class D power amp.

Learn More: Bi-Wiring and Bi-Amping Explained >

While you can not see it there is a really neat porting system inside the Duetto made out of aluminum. It has a unique curved shape they developed and it also is part of the heat sink for the power amps.

The Sonus Faber engineers did some serious listening tests on the DAC’s that are used inside the Duetto. They actually needed two, one set for the main speaker and another to handle all the great subwoofer controls. They picked a premium ESS Sabre DAC for the main job and an AKM DAC to handle the subwoofer. This just shows their total dedication to getting the best possible sound.

Performance & Testing

Like all smart speakers, the Duetto needs to be set up to work with your network. Sonus Faber made this really easy. Apple users can use the Apple Home app and add it as an accessory and Android users can add it using Google Home.

We found the Apple method to only take a few seconds as you just look for it with an iPhone in your network settings, connect to it and it will quickly be on your network. For Android users, the Google Home app is a breeze for setup albeit a little more time-consuming than with an iPhone. Then you’ll need to pair the two speakers and scan the QR code on the back of the manual to get to the setup interface.

The dedicated stands coming out were not available yet, so we placed them on some 24” tall stands and positioned them in about an equilateral triangle to our listening spot. We later moved them to the top of a long credenza to check out the boundary controls, which did work great.

From the first notes, the Duetto will show you why so many people love the sound of Sonus Faber speakers. In many ways, we felt these sounded better than some of their passive bookshelf speakers. Biamping a speaker like is done with the Duetto just has so many advantages. You have no passive crossover in the way and the amps inside are specifically designed for the speaker driver they are connected to. The Duetto has a completely effortless sound in the top end and upper midrange that rivals some of the much more expensive Sonus Faber models to our ears.

If you set them up so you are sitting an equal distance from each speaker, the soundstage will extend outside the speaker with tons of front-to-back depth. The Duetto totally disappeared giving a huge soundstage.

As to be expected with a 4 ½” bass driver, bass is limited, but what is there gives you the feeling of weight you expect to hear from a full range speaker. It is not as defined as larger speakers but very pleasant nonetheless.

The first cut we tried was a high-res redo of The Doors, “Riders on the Storm”. If you know this song it starts out with a thunderstorm and this was just spooky good on the Duetto. Every sound was placed eerily in a big three-dimensional space. When Jim Morrison's vocals came in, he was dead center with the resolving power of the Duetto letting us hear all the micro volume inflections in his voice that on a great system give it such a haunting sound. The cymbals also felt amazingly effortless. As an aside, if you are a Doors fan, this is a very special reissue as Bruce Botnick, their long-time engineer, did a fantastic job remixing.

Next up was Look “Look Out for My Love” from Neil Young’s latest release Chrome Dreams. On this cut, Neil Young’s vocals are full of all kinds of emotion that a great system will let you hear. Like the previous track, the Duetto let through all of those small dynamic and harmonic changes with ease. We are sure the way they can reveal such subtle dynamic contrasts has a lot to do with those biamped custom drivers.

Another great cut was from the first Joni Mitchell album in a long time, Joni Mitchell at Newport. In this live performance, “Big Yellow Taxi” comes off as just a ton of fun. There are several famous backup singers doing vocals on this track and they are not all perfectly in sync with each other, which gives it that great live feel. The Duettos also captured the big feeling of space you expect from a live outdoor performance.

Just for grins, we had a REL Serie T/9x sub close by so we decided to pair it up with the Duettos. After dialing it in, which resulted in setting the crossover at about 80 hz in our room, everything got even better. The bass, as you would expect, was much tighter, faster, and deeper. The big deal was taking the bass away from the 4 ½” driver and what an improvement that made in the midrange. It became even more effortless making it easier to hear all those tiny dynamics that make great speakers sound closer to live music.

While this combination is not inexpensive, the sound it offered was probably better than almost anything you could put together with a streamer, amp, and passive pair of speakers. These Duettos are really that good!

Overall Recommendation

The Sonus Faber Duetto is an incredible all-in-one speaker system. Offering connectivity for many applications, we see it going into many different environments where a music lover wants great sound with the simplicity of not needing other components to produce incredible sound. Should you add a fast subwoofer, you will have a world class audio system that rivals expensive separate components, but brings the beautiful look of Italian-designed gear into your home.

There are obviously far less expensive ways to go in the powered speaker world, but Sonus Faber has nailed it with the Duetto. You get the sound that made them famous in a simple package that will add a touch of elegance to your home.

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