THE DESIGN

Power and grace. Dynamic and melody. Fullness and void. Kindness and impetuosity. Harmony and chaos. Seemingly opposite strong contrasts that co-exist in the music.

Lilium has been designed to shape those great contrasts expressed by music. It is the will of synthesis of two opposite elements: two separate identities that, although working independently one from each other, cooperate inside the same shape.

The creation of a shape that holds two distinct elements has been a big challenge from a technical point of view and from a design one as well.

Everything was basically about the need find a new way to put together the large volume required to reproduce the very low frequencies, with the structure dedicated to the reproduction of the main portion of the audible spectrum.

The marked separation between these two elements is made visually clear by the use of different materials: finely wrought walnut wood for the front part and a definitely softer material – leather – for the rear enclosure.

Sonus faber have decided to adopt the organic style of the natural shapes, which is the family the Lilium belongs to. Undoubtedly, this result marks a further step forward in the stylistic and acoustic research by Sonus faber.

THE ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC PROJECT

Lilium obviously has much of the DNA of Aida. Sonus faber was strongly challenged in transferring the main technological features of our flagship on a “smaller sister” having the ambition of being more easily usable.

The “Brain Tsunami” that they literally did, has led to surprising results, and in fact to a different and much more advanced speaker than expected; it is really reductive to simply define Lilium as a scaled down version of Aida!

Necessarily Lilium benefits even from the powerful experience of Ex3ma; we can say that Lilium holds – less immediately visible – the DNA of the loudspeaker celebrating thirty years of Sonus faber’s history.

Lilium is the “next step” in our quest for vibration and spurious noise freedom. Here we have gone to extremes. In this project we adopted drastic solutions: one enclosure for the subwoofer, with a “no port noise” passive radiator (heritage of Ex3ma), decoupled from the enclosure of the main spectrum radiators and with the axis of subwoofer and ABR at 90° (orthogonal) to the main radiation axis of all other drivers, to avoid any direct/indirect modulation.

The driver units complement are a totally new project and a 100% Sonus faber design and development; of course they follow a musical attitude that is becoming every day more and more recognizable: a new high-speed 29mm soft dome DAD tweeter, a new midrange and new midwoofers, both having a size of 180 mm (same diameter and similar structure for the best “merging” of the relative spectra). Finally the 11” subwoofer and its companion ABR are also special, in the sense that they have been sonically optimized for these very low frequencies’ reproduction.

The crossover also pays a strong tribute to the Ex3ma, borrowing some of its key solutions.