The Suprema Room

Two Sonus faber flagships in one room, driven by two different Burmester chains. One is the current statement loudspeaker; the other is a limited edition for which LMC is the sole authorized US dealer. Hearing them in the same space is not an arrangement available anywhere else in the country.

System 1 — Sonus faber Suprema

The Suprema is the flagship of Sonus faber’s current line and one of very few loudspeakers designed for a room of this size. Amplification is Burmester at the top of the catalogue: the 100 Phono Preamplifier and 175 Turntable for vinyl, into a pair of 159 Signature Line Mono Power Amplifiers driving the Suprema directly.

The Signature Line sits above everything else Burmester makes, and the 100 is a full phono stage in its own chassis rather than a card inside a preamplifier. That is what allows the analogue path here to be taken as seriously as the digital one instead of treated as a courtesy.

Digital is the current dCS Vivaldi APEX stack — Vivaldi APEX DAC, Vivaldi Upsampler and Vivaldi Master Clock. That three-box architecture has anchored reference dCS systems for over a decade, and the reason it persists is division of labour: upsampling, conversion and timing each get their own chassis and their own power supply rather than competing for the same supply inside one box.

A full Transparent Reference Gen 6 loom ties the chain together. This is the room to hear the Suprema at the level Sonus faber engineered it to reveal — driven by Signature Line amplification, sourced by digital and analogue paths of the same tier.

System 2 — the Sonus faber SE

The SE is Sonus faber’s limited edition masterpiece, available only by special request from premier clientele, with LMC Home Entertainment as the sole authorized US dealer. Each pair is built to order in Vicenza over roughly four months, in any finish the client specifies.

Amplification is dual Burmester 909 MK5 monoblocks bridged in mono per channel — close to 2,000 watts a side into the SE’s 15-inch side-firing woofer, dual 10-inch front-firing woofers, and its Beryllium-dome midrange and tweeter array. Bridging two monoblocks per channel rather than using one is a decision about headroom rather than volume: the amplifier is never asked to work near its limit, so what the loudspeaker receives stays the same whether the passage is quiet or overwhelming.

The preamplifier is the Burmester 088, with the 948 Power Conditioner providing DC suppression and high-frequency filtering across the whole chain. Digital comes from the Linn Klimax DSM, Linn’s flagship streamer and DAC, feeding the 088 into the 909 MK5 pair. A full Transparent Reference Gen 6 loom runs throughout.

This is the configuration Jeff Dorgay described in TONEAudio’s SE review, published February 2019 from this room. It remains the reference SE demonstration in the United States.

Two flagships, one room

The two systems answer different questions. The Suprema is what Sonus faber builds when designing for the widest possible reference application — a loudspeaker meant to be specified, shipped and set up in rooms around the world. The SE is what the company builds when that constraint is removed and a pair is made to order for one client.

Both run Burmester, which keeps the comparison honest. What separates them is the loudspeaker and the amplification topology behind it: Signature Line monoblocks driving directly, against a pair of 909 MK5s bridged per channel.

The systems in this room

• Sonus faber Suprema loudspeakers
• Burmester 100 Phono Preamplifier and 175 Turntable
• Burmester 159 Signature Line Mono Power Amplifiers
• dCS Vivaldi APEX DAC, Vivaldi Upsampler and Vivaldi Master Clock
• Sonus faber SE loudspeakers — LMC is the sole authorized US dealer
• Burmester 909 MK5 monoblocks, bridged in mono per channel
• Burmester 088 preamplifier
• Burmester 948 Power Conditioner
• Linn Klimax DSM streamer and DAC
• Transparent Reference Gen 6 cabling throughout

Hearing it

This is the room for anyone specifying a Sonus faber flagship, and the only room in the United States where the SE can be heard as a demonstration rather than commissioned unheard — which matters for a loudspeaker built to order over four months in a finish chosen before anyone has listened to it.

Anyone weighing the Suprema against a Wilson flagship should also spend time in the Reference Room, where the Autobiography and the Chronosonic XVX make the opposing case on comparable amplification.

The Suprema Room is in the Scottsdale showroom. Walk in during business hours, or book ahead if you want both systems set up and the time to move between them.