Sigberg Audio Saranna Active Floor-Standing Loudspeakers With Cardioid Bass!

Our past encounters with Sigberg Audio products had left us deeply impressed by their engineering expertise as was seen in our reviews of the SBS.1 active speaker and 10D subwoofer. It wasn’t just their craftsmanship and performance that impressed us but also their adherence to sensible design concepts that doesn’t really resemble anything else on the market despite how rational these approaches are. So when Sigberg Audio announces a new product, it definitely pays to listen for anyone interested in high-fidelity sound. This brings us to Sigberg Audio’s launch of a new floor-standing speaker that is packed to the gills with state-of-the-art loudspeaker design: the Saranna.

The Saranna is a fully active three-way tower speaker that employs similar design cues that we have seen before from Sigberg Audio but refines and expands on them for even higher performance. Let’s get into the details by talking about the top of the frequency band, the tweeter. The Saranna uses a custom coaxial driver for the midrange and tweeter, meaning that the tweeter is nested within the midrange. The big advantage of this is that there is no delay or phase difference that occurs when the drivers are separated by distance as happens with most other loudspeakers. That means there should be excellent time domain and phase coherence between the tweeter and midrange at all points around the speaker, not just the front of the speaker. Sigberg Audio’s SBS.1 and Manta speakers took this approach as well, but the Saranna uses a much more powerful custom coaxial driver than is found in Sigberg’s other speakers.

The Saranna tweeter is a compression driver that uses a 1.7” polyamide dome with an extraordinary 101dB sensitivity. It uses the midrange driver as a waveguide for tightly controlled directivity. The midrange driver has an 8” treated paper cone which uses a 2.5” voice coil that is mounted in a ring of neodymium magnets. That will make it very powerful and efficient (as well as expensive). That Saranna will certainly not be short on dynamic range with a coaxial driver like that.

Bass is handled by two rear-mounted 8” subwoofer drivers which Sigberg Audio promises will deliver 20 Hz of in-room extension. These sub drivers have nearly 12mm of one-way linear throw- a lot for an 8” woofer! Crossover points are between 100Hz to 200Hz from midrange to subs, and 1.6kHz from midrange to tweeter.  The built-in plate amplifier gives 250 watts to the midrange, 250 watts to the subs, and 100 watts to the tweeter. The plate amp uses Hypex’s nCore class-D amplifiers, and those have to be among the best out there. They are very efficient and also very low in distortion and noise. Such a sensitive coaxial driver probably would have required the use of such a high-performance amplifier since the noise floor of many plate amps might have been audible given the driver’s sensitivity. The Hypex nCore amps are not cheap but were definitely the right way to go for such a loudspeaker design.

One neat feature about the Saranna’s amplifier is that users who want a more customizable sound can adjust it if they install Hypex’s software on their PC. That enables a 9-band parametric EQ as well as three factory presets which can adjust bass levels by +2dB, 0dB, or -2dB. The amp has a lot of connectivity as well with an XLR input and through, AES input and through, RCA input and through, optical input, and S/PDIF coaxial input and through. It doesn’t have Bluetooth connectivity, but I doubt that many people who buy such high-performance speakers are going to use Bluetooth audio on them. It seems to be omitting USB audio as well, but oh well. It can accommodate almost any type of system otherwise. 

One very interesting design aspect of the Saranna is the use of enclosure openings to direct rear cone radiation to reduce sound emanating from the sides and rear of the speaker thus giving the speaker a cardioid radiation pattern. Or, to state it more plainly, the speaker has found a clever way to limit sound from directions other than the front. Many speakers do this to an extent naturally, but that restriction on sound dispersion only goes down to treble and some midrange frequencies. The Saranna has this directivity control down to bass frequencies. It controls its sound radiation much more tightly than conventional designs. That makes the Saranna more amenable to a wider variety of acoustic situations than conventional loudspeaker designs. In other words, the Saranna will be less affected by room acoustics than typical speakers.

The enclosure looks to be a stout one; at 45” tall, it’s not a huge speaker, but it still manages nearly a 100 lbs weight. One reason for that weight is the 1 ⅓” thick back panel which has to be thick in order to support dual subwoofer drivers. The midrange chambers have no parallel surfaces except for the port sides. A rear-mounted slot port carries a very wide flaring in order to eliminate port noise. Sigberg Audio claims it should have an in-room response down to 20Hz. The Saranna speakers have specially made viscoelastic feet designed to damp their specific weight in order to minimize vibration transfer to and from the floor.

The Saranna speakers come in two different finishes: “Fade to Black” and “Shady White.” They have a black or white painted front baffle with Italian multilaminar wood veneer side panels. A slight backward lean also gives them a sense of style rather than the typical boxy loudspeakers. At over $23k/pair, the Saranna speakers are not cheap, but they pack a lot of technology and performance into a reasonably-sized package, as well as European style and craftsmanship. That price includes VAT and import taxes for American buyers. Buyers who take advantage of a pre-order discount that lasts until May 1st, 2025 get a 10% discount. The Saranna speakers are the most ambitious designs from Sigberg Audio to date, and they look perfect for those who want state-of-the-art performance from a loudspeaker that isn’t a gigantic bruiser.  

Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.