$120,000 Speakers Are Like Parking a Symphony in Your Den

You can drop upward of $100,000 on a Tesla Model S P85D or a BMW i8, and odds are, you’ll be happy with either of them. On the other hand, you’re still gonna stress about street parking and some jerk keying your car. Plus, expensive cars still get stuck in traffic just like a jalopy.

So with that in mind, a much wiser investment—if you’re looking to drop six figures on a toy—might be a pair of these 5.6-foot-tall Sonus Faber Aida speakers. They’ll always have a parking space in your living room, and they’ll sound better than any car stereo.

These $120,000 Italian-made floor-standing speakers aren’t exactly new, but they match quality with style in a way you’d expect from such a high end of the market. The front panel, which is of course swathed in leather, houses four of the speaker’s seven drivers: a 1-inch moving-coil tweeter, two 8.6-inch woofers, and a 7-inch midrange driver with a diaphragm composed of “traditional cellulose pulp, kapok, kenaf and other natural fibers.” There’s more leather around the back, as well as another tweeter and midrange driver. You can tune them to match your listening environment using the “Sound Field Shaper” knobs.

Sonus Faber

Where’s the subwoofer, you ask? There’s one per speaker, and you can’t see them unless you tip over these 365-pound behemoths. (Don’t do that). A 12.5-inch subwoofer points downward at an angle. The angled woofers are positioned on a slope of each speaker’s A-frame suspension system, where the bass fires into a sound-optimizing chamber. Each woofer’s bass effect can also be tweaked with the knobs on the back of each unit.

The result of all that, according to various glowing reviews, is that these speakers don’t really sound like speakers They sound more like musicians performing in your home. That’s provided you have a solid amplifier or amplifiers driving them.

As with a lot of Italian-made things, they also bet big on aesthetics. Their tear-drop cross-sectional shape is inspired by a lyre, according to Sonus Faber, and other elements make them look even more like string instruments. There’s a wrap-around wooden sheath available in lacquered red, walnut, white, and graphite finishes, and the string-like speaker grill also adds to the instrument-like looks: Each speaker vaguely resembles a harp or a double bass.

But the Aidas’ looks aren’t for everyone’s eyeballs, including the ones attached to Gadget Lab senior editor Mike Calore. A couple of harps won’t fit into his decor. If you’re looking for a pair of ridiculously good, even more ridiculously expensive speakers, Calore recommends opting for a pair of the Radialstrahler MBL 101 X-Tremes instead. At $263,000, they cost twice the Sonus Faber Aidas, but it’s a small price to pay for transforming your listening room into something that resembles the set of Metropolis.