“You should review big speakers. You have the room for it.”
So said some friends way back when and you know what? They were right.
The YG Acoustics Sonja 3.3 arrived last Wednesday in six wood crates on two pallets with a total shipping weight of 1,275lbs.
Once uncrated and assembled, with most of the heavy lifting done by YG’s very knowledgeable and personable Duncan Taylor, they drop down to 195lbs. a piece and stand 70″ tall. That’s 5′ 10″ in human height. The cabinets are made from “Dual layer aerospace aluminum…with constrained layer damping” a hallmark of YG design and most of what you see as well as most of you don’t—because it’s hiding inside—is designed, fabricated, and assembled at the company’s Arvada, CO facility.
The Sonja 3.3 are a 3-way design, as the name suggests, with two of YG’s 6″ BilletCore drivers sitting over an under, in MTM fashion, a lattice hybrid tweeter “with advanced airframe”.
If we zoom way in on that tweeter, you can see the ultra-fine level detail and carved ‘rays’ emanating from the driver. I’ll let YG explain from the Technologies section of their website (recommended reading):
Our Lattice tweeters use an airframe machined in-house from a specially-selected aluminum alloy. Starting from an 80g billet, we produce a final Lattice airframe weighing less than 0.03g (0.001oz), finished to a precision finer than 0.001mm. Its shape is the result of millions of CPU hours of computational optimization, providing industry-leading impulse response, bandwidth and accuracy. It also broadens the angular emission pattern of the tweeter at high frequencies, providing a very large sweet spot.
Bass is handled by a pair of 10.25″ BilletCore drivers and all told “usable output extends from below 20 Hz to 40 kHz” according to the company. Sensitivity is rated at 88 dB with a 2.6 Ohm minimum impedance. You’ll want some muscle to drive ’em.
Everything about the Sonja 3.3 is essentially new including the crossovers that use in-house designed and manufactured capacitors. And as their Technologies page explains, YG uses multi-domain models and large-scale parallel computing as part of their development process so DIYers need not apply unless you have a supercomputer in the basement.
I plan to pair the Sonja 3.3s with a number of amps and of greater importance, and interest, they’ll be introduced to scads of music including old and new favorites as well as yet to be discovered (by me) future favorites. Stay tuned.
YG Acoustics Sonja 3.3
Price: $146,800/pair
Company Website: YG Acoustics
Specifications
Speaker Type
- 3-way passive floor-standing loudspeaker
- Dual layer aerospace aluminum cabinet with constrained layer damping
Drivers
- Lattice hybrid tweeter with advanced airframe
- Dual 15 cm (6”) BilletCore driver with advanced neodymium motor magnets
- Dual 26 cm (10.25”) BilletCore driver with ultra-high field strength motor
Crossover
- Ultracoherent crossovers at 90 Hz and 1.85 kHz
- Exceptional phase alignment: ±5° relative phase over range where driver relative output is within 20 dB
- Optimized for phase alignment, phase slope and transient response
- Custom capacitors including pure metal foil models
- Advanced resistors including multiple foil resistors for exceptional imaging and transient response
- Advanced resonance-damped inductors
- Computationally optimised layouts to minimise component interactions
Response
- Usable output extends from below 20 Hz to 40 kHz
- Exceptionally low distortion throughout range
- Excellent pair matching
Sensitivity
- 88 dB
Impedance
- 4 Ohms average
- 2.8 Ohms minimum
Dimensions
- 179 × 43 × 72 cm (H × W × D)
- 70 × 17 × 28” (H × W × D)
Weight
- 225 kg per speaker
- 495 lbs per speaker
Finishes
- Standard finishes are silver and black
- Please contact your dealer for other finish options
