Scottsdale Front Entrance

Most dealers put something modest by the door. This one put the Aida there — Sonus faber's Reference Collection flagship, the model directly below Suprema — driven by a pair of McIntosh MC3500 Mk II vacuum tube monoblocks, in the first space a visitor walks into at Scottsdale.

The room itself

An entrance is an open, hard, untreated space, and no amount of setup changes that. What makes the placement work is something Aida has and most loudspeakers do not: the Sound Field Shaper on the rear of the cabinet — a 29 mm DAD tweeter and two 80 mm midranges — which adjusts how much energy the loudspeaker throws behind itself. In a treated room that is a refinement. In an entrance it is the control that lets the system sit properly in a space nobody designed for it.

Inside the cabinet a Tuned Mass Damper, the same anti-resonance principle used in tall buildings, vibrates in antiphase against the enclosure, and the 'Silent Case' — curved on both sides — manages the energy that remains. Aida stands 1,725 mm, weighs roughly 165 kilograms per loudspeaker, and reaches 18 Hz.

System — Sonus faber Aida on McIntosh MC3500 Mk II

The MC3500 Mk II is McIntosh's modern tribute to the amplifier Bill Hanley used to amplify Woodstock in 1969: 350 watts of vacuum tube power, one channel per chassis, delivered through the Unity Coupled Circuit output transformer that has been McIntosh's defining piece of engineering since 1949. Aida asks for between 100 and 1,000 watts into a 4-ohm nominal load at 92 dB sensitivity. A pair of MC3500 Mk IIs sits comfortably inside that.

The preamplifier is the C12000, and the pairing is not incidental — McIntosh introduced the C12000 in 2021 as the partner to the MC3500 Mk II. It arrives as two chassis: the controller, carrying the power supplies and control logic, and the audio chassis, which holds both a solid-state and a vacuum tube output stage, selectable per source. In front of tube monoblocks that is the interesting choice to have, and it can be made without moving a cable.

The source is a Linn Selekt DSM Edition Hub, with Space Optimisation correcting for the space. An MPC1500 power controller feeds the whole stack through a toroidal isolation transformer, its blue meters reading incoming voltage and current draw rather than watts.

The system in this room

• Sonus faber Aida loudspeakers
• McIntosh MC3500 Mk II vacuum tube monoblocks, one per channel
• McIntosh C12000 two-chassis preamplifier
• McIntosh MPC1500 power controller
• Linn Selekt DSM Edition Hub network music player

Hearing it

You will hear this one on the way in, without asking for it. Come in during business hours at Scottsdale and it will be playing. If you would like it set up for something specific, or compared against one of the demonstration rooms, call ahead and we will have it ready.