Sunfire’s Cinema Ribbon Speakers Deliver Performance, Affordability and Looks

This past winter marked a return for noted engineer Bob Carver to his earlier days. Back in the 1970s, Carver explored the benefits of ribbon loudspeaker technologies, which later led to his ribbon-based loudspeakers.

Fast-forward to 2007. Carver has launched a line of ribbon speaker products that can be used for two-channel or multichannel audio listening. Through his research into cabinet and ribbon designs, as well as more efficient manufacturing capabilities, the company's newest speakers should please the lifestyle and audiophile crowds without lighting their wallets significantly.

Technologies

Ribbon speakers have been around for decades and many audiophiles treasure the transducer technology for its fast transients, imaging and immense detail capabilities.

As part of the engineering process for the Sunfire Cinema Ribbon line of products, Carver started from the ground up by focusing on a list of goals he wanted to achieve. His research took him back to the work done in the RCA Research Laboratories on cabinet interactions, which led him down the path of creating cabinets that minimize diffraction and other problems through the use of specific shapes.

Carver also examined the psychoacoustic research done by Henry Kloss to help him meet his imaging and soundstage goals. He also examined research conducted by BMW on how to achieve flat-frequency response in an automotive environment through the use of fones instead of the industry standard decibels.

The end result is speakers that offer 90dB sensitivity ratings, dual side-firing 4.5-inch woofers and 6-inch ribbons.

Setup

The speakers' boundary switches facilitate their use as on-wall or freestanding products by providing a selector for locations. After assembling the stands, which Sunfire sent along, I placed the speakers in their locations, adjusted the boundary switches to their appropriate settings, connected my Transparent cables and began to toe-in and move the front speakers around to my liking.

Wrapping up, I installed Sunfire's Solitaire 10 subwoofer to round things out. I also want to point that, because of their size, I found the speakers easy to work with. So, I think they should be easy to handle in the field.

Performance

With the setup out of the way, I started listening. What I discovered was not unexpected; the speakers were light in the low end and I was localizing the sub's position. To address these issues, I moved the sub closer to the center of the room and dropped the crossover from 110Hz to 100Hz.

I also suspected that the speakers needed some break-in, but I wanted to confirm what I was hearing with Sunfire's Eric Harper. Eric advised me to drop the crossover to 90Hz and to let the speakers break-in.

With more than 75 hours of break-in out of the way, I started some serious listening with Dave Matthews, Lisa Loeb and Stevie Ray Vaughn. What I found with two-channel music was a super-wide soundstage that was as detailed as any speaker that's on the market -- without any glare.

The system's imaging was spot on too. I could locate Matthews' use of electric guitars in the track "#41" hovering over the right side of the image. In Loeb's popular song "Stay (I Missed You)," I could delineate the track's use of acoustic and electric guitar parts that were present to add texture to the song, as well as the woody timbre of what sounds like the drummer's piccolo snare that sat firmly in the center of the mix.

I had also noticed that the upper bass response and transients had deepened and tightened up, and the localization had also disappeared. The mid bass wasn't as tight as I would have liked, but the deeper bass, around 40Hz, had weight.

With movies, such as "The Da Vinci Code," the center channel really shined as dialog was reproduced without any coloration and the CRM-2C provided the resolution necessary to depict the slightest inflection of Tom Hanks' voice during the movie.

Final Thoughts

Given the line's prices, performance and quality, I think these speakers are a great solution for clients that desire a small, competitively-priced speaker system.

If a dealer carefully integrates these speakers with a subwoofer in order to achieve a proper blend, the speakers offer an undeniable upgrade over the HTiB garbage that's out there.

The speakers could easily become the staple speaker for installers looking for the combination of performance, affordability and looks.

MSRP is $800 each