I‘ve had some really fun times with Sonus Fabers and had 2 systems (in series not parallel) one based around an absolutely gorgeous, as in stand and admire and gently brush with the fingers, extremely dense and heavy Extrema with its incredibly effective almost horn-like acoustic impedance which boosts bass efficiency and allows the Extrema to create room energising bass to levels and frequencies that unseen, you‘d never attribute to a 2 way stand mounted speaker, at least not in those days. The downside of these speakers is literally their weight and therefore the ’resistance to moving‘ you encounter every tIme you want to try a different playing position, which in the very beginning meant moving this small ‘behemoth’ many times around the room looking for their optimum position. Lots of sweat and grunting involved. Before setting out I developed a simple algorithm for finding the optimum place, which involved a lot of moves and comparisons, moving, comparing, establishing new bests, then moving again in smaller increments until the most optimum was found. Same process for width, same for toe in. Its very laborious and must be carried out in 1 day, and contains a couple of moves simply to confirm the quality of the final reference. When the Extremas were positioned in this way and driven by Balanced Audio Technologies’ VK 500 SS monoblocks, the power and naturalness of the music they could produce had to be heard to be believed and their reputation as a high-end loudspeaker was well deserved. The measure of a great speaker is its ability to completely thrill its listeners with intense feelings and emotions and this is exactly what the Extrema did. It was a speaker that needed a dedicated room to sound its best because its best position was well away from walls, far apart and well toed in towards the listener, who sits in a reasonably near field position, formed by a very wide, relatively flat triangle. With the system set up this way, it felt like it was putting on performances of the music it was playing, with lots of drama and spacial accuracy. I had a large basement room which was almost ideal once it was well treated to deal with the many hard surfaces and I had lots of good vinyl and BAT’s tube phono and pre-amps and later their VKD5 and D5SE CDPs……Happy days and for sure its the ‘proverbial speaker I wish I’d never sold’. Many years later but I’m certain the Extrema still represents a very special transducer in terms of its ability to create a hugely wide and deep, 3 dimensional sound stage