Sonus Faber Amati Futura listening impressions

TLDR: These speakers sound as beautiful as they look.

As some of you already know, I was recently inquiring about these speakers, being very attracted to their sound but also concerned about their age (they are about 12-14 years old). Well, in the end I took the plunge and bought them. As I promised, here are my listening impressions. 

Please keep in mind that this particular pair of speakers have new woofers, identical to the originals, that haven't been burned in yet, they have about 35 play hours right now, so there is still room for improvement. Also, there is still a lot of optimization to be done during the following months regarding the positioning of the speakers as well as other small adjustments. There are 74cm of free space between the speakers and the back (long) wall and about 185cm between the speakers, inner edge to inner edge, in a rather small room of 23 square meters with a 2.4m high ceiling.

Associated equipment: Innuos Zen MK3 streamer, Accuphase DP-550 SACD player mainly used as a dac, Accuphase E-470 integrated amplifier, Neotech Neet 1008 silver Ethernet cable, Vermouth Reference copper USB cable, Lessloss C-marc power cable plugged into a Gigawatt PF-2 EVO filtering power strip, Clearer Audio Copper Line interconnect, speaker cables and jumpers and a few power cords.

Treble: excellent! I was a bit afraid the highs might be a bit rolled off, several reviews including one in Stereophile mentioned this and I also heard it during my first encounter with the Futura's a few years ago. Well, I'm happy to say that in my room with my system the top extension is very good. Also, the highs are at the same time smooth, refined and detailed, definitely more so than the highs in my previous Spendor SP2/3R2.

Midrange: I knew this is these speakers' strongest asset (the same can be said about my Spendors, though they are not in the same class). However, achieving midrange greatness required some work. Since my system has been tuned to make the Spendors sing, which are very midrange centric, at first the more linear Futura felt a bit scooped in the mids. In particular, the upper midrange, while very smooth, was somewhat more forward than the lower mids. After a bit of speaker (and mild furniture) repositioning, moving the listening position lower and closer to the speakers as well as engagind the "Compensation" (=loudness) button, the lower mids filled back in and the whole midrange is full, rich, resonant, in a word gorgeous! The violins are like honey, the piano is great, wooden instruments sound like wood, brass is, well, brass-y... A sensual sound you can fall in love with.

Bass: as expected, this was - and still is, to a certain degree - tough. There is plenty of bass overall, and plenty extended. Also, it is well articulated. My room is "eating" some bass, I think, so in the past I had to use that loudness button not only with my Spendors 2/3R2, but also, surprisingly, with Spendor Classic 100 and with Sonus Faber Serafino (in the later two cases this resulted in borderline excessive bass, but it could have been tamed with just a bit of effort). With the Futura there was enough bass without the loudness button engaged. However, there were some dips in the midbass and in the lower mids. On "Train to Isalo" by Nicholas Parent Trio, after the left side guitar opening the track enters a percussion instrument (drum?) that has a lot of midrange content but also some bass "meat". Well, the bass was not really there. All this can probably be solved with speaker positioning and maybe also by changing the listening position, but for the moment my solution was to engage the loudness button again, do some adjustments in the room and plug the lower bass reflex port (there's 3 of them, each corresponding to a driver) with a sock. it's not the perfect solution yet, but I'll get there for sure, it's a work in progress; right now, the bass is a bit excessive on some of the albums, but the midbass and lower mids have filled in nicely, the sound is full range, meaty and beautiful.

Other parameters: I was particularly surprised by the level of detail compared to my Spendors. Of course I knew these are in a totally different class but I did not have this feeling of total superiority when listening to the Serafino (except in the treble, but even there I was not as impressed with the Serafino's detail superiority as I am with the Futura's now). Speaking of Serafino, to my ears Futura are much better: more refined, more detailed (perhaps only equal in the treble, but just perhaps), much better timbre (Serafino were lacking midrange body and color by comparison), much better bass in terms of authority and extension, bigger sounding. more musical / magic. I've also heard the first version of the Amati Tradition (before G2 I think), they are better than Serafino but still cut from the same cloth, still not at Futura level for my ears. In absolute terms, Futura do sound big, close to my past Martin Logan Impression 11 (bigger n the bass, not quite as big in the midrange). Also, for my musical preferences, mainly consisting in jazz and classical, the Futura are absolutely dynamic enough (especially macrodynamics). And of course, timbre reproduction is spot on, with the right equipment these speakers can sound rich, full, tonally saturated, very believable and natural.

This turned quite long, closer to a review than to mere impressions. It's the Futura's fault. You can tell I kinda like them...