I only found out yesterday that Sony makes a $60,000 set of home theatre speakers! After getting all the info sent to me from Sony NZ I have found I am some what obsessing with the Sony SS-AR1’s!
And just look at them! They just scream class with the piano black finish!
When a lot of people think of Sony they think of low to mid level car audio, what they tend to forget is that Sony has been a big part of the Movie, Entertainment and Music Industries for quite sometime and had established itself as a company in 1958 so it only makes sense that they do make high-end home theatre speakers too especially in today’s market!
The Sony SS-AR1’s have been on the market for over a decade now and a lot of people have not seen them let alone heard them. I myself haven’t been lucky enough to hear them but will be going out of my way to listen to them on my next trip out of NZ.
On another note when Yoshiyuki Kaku (Sony’s Acoustic Manager) developed the Sony SS-AR1’s he spent seven years doing so playing various types of music listening and tuning, listening and tuning one track after another repeating this process until the sound was perfect! For this reason alone I have to hear these Loud-Speakers!
The physical size of the Sony SS-AR1’s are only a very subtle 1080mm high, 320mm wide and 490mm deep which is surprisingly small for a Loud-Speaker but weigh in at 57Kg’s each. The Sony SS-AR1’s are a Three-Way Vented-Box Loudspeaker with two separate chambers, one chamber housing the 1″ Soft-Dome Tweeter and 5″ Sliced Paper-Cone Midrange Driver and the other chamber housing the two 8″ Aluminium-Cone Woofers.
The choice of drivers are surprising due to the fact were not built by Sony but for Sony by Scan-Speak in Denmark to Sony’s design! Yoshiyuki Kaku explains that he tried different drivers from all around the world basing his decision on which drivers had the most natural sound.
The twin 8″ woofers are aluminium with oversized ferrite magnets and copper rings to optimise the symmetry of the magnetic field and reduce distortion.
The 5″ treated-paper midrange drivers feature characteristic slicing and re-gluing in a pattern designed to reduce resonances in the cone and again boast high-efficiency ferrite magnets and a copper ring in the magnetic circuit.
The 1″ soft-dome tweeter is backed by six neodymium magnets in a circle arrangement for maximum flux density (Something I have only seen done before on a DDZ Woofer Motor!)
When it comes obsession during cabinet building I think the Sony SS-AR1’s take the cake! The Hokkaido Maple used on the front baffle is hand picked from logs on one of Japan’s northern islands during November when the wood grain is the tightest, the wood is then laminated and compressed to form a strong 50mm thick baffle. A second cold-climate wood Nordic Birch was selected for the rest of the cabinet, again laminated and compressed but this time to a 32mm thickness.
As much as I’d love to own a $60,000 set of speakers I’d also have to spend a lot of time listening to them to justify spending that kind of money, the three month build time wouldn’t even phase me since the wood used can only be harvested at a certain time of year and the fact that they are hand-built!
There is just something about these loudspeakers that says to me, put them in the lounge with the ES-Series for the rest of surround setup! In saying that, until I win lotto I will have to settle to listening to them next year when I travel to the US!
For more info about the Sony SS-AR1’s CLICK HERE