Sonus faber’s Sonetto G2 floorstanders, side by side. Here is the Sonetto V G2 between the compact Sonetto III G2 and the flagship Sonetto VIII G2, showing what your money buys at each step.

The Sonetto V G2 is the point in the Sonetto range where a dedicated midrange driver appears, and that single change alters the character of the speaker considerably. Below it, the Sonetto III splits the work between a midwoofer and a woofer in a 2.5-way arrangement. Here, a purpose-built Camelia midrange handles the vocal range on its own, housed in a sealed cork chamber, and both the driver and the chamber are drawn directly from the Suprema, Sonus faber’s flagship. It is a proper three-way floorstander for a medium or large room, and it is where the Sonetto line starts to feel like a serious speaker rather than an accessible one.

Brief product overview

A three-way, reflex-loaded floorstander with a 1.1-inch DAD Arrow Point silk dome tweeter with a copper shorting ring, a 6.5-inch Camelia midrange with an aluminium phase plug, and two 6.5-inch pulp-cone woofers with aluminium demodulation rings, crossing over at 280Hz and 2.5kHz. The tweeter and midrange share an oval cork chamber attached to the back of the baffle, a material and approach inherited from the Suprema; its asymmetric shape breaks up the circular resonant modes that a conventional enclosure would encourage. Frequency response runs from 35Hz to 40kHz, sensitivity is 89dB and nominal impedance is 4 ohms, with 50 to 320 watts recommended. The lute-shaped cabinet has been redesigned for this generation to control internal resonance, built from open-pore wood veneer, leather and a concrete base, in walnut, wenge or black. It stands 1,081mm tall and weighs 33.4kg each, and it is made in Vicenza.

How it sounds

The Camelia midrange and its cork chamber are what you hear first: voices and instruments in the middle of the range have a clarity and an organic quality that no 2.5-way arrangement quite matches, because the driver handling them is doing nothing else. Around that, the twin woofers give real weight and extension down to 35Hz, and the soundstage is broad, stable and three-dimensional. It is a detailed but unfatiguing speaker, and reviewers have been consistent on where it sits: it does justice to demanding material and rewards careful listening, but if outright bombast and very high levels are your priority, there are more forceful speakers at the price. At 89dB it does not need enormous power, but its impedance and phase behaviour mean an amplifier genuinely comfortable with a 4-ohm load matters more than the wattage figure.

What we’d partner it with

The Hegel H400 is a strong match for exactly that reason. Its 250 watts of dual-mono Class A/B sit comfortably inside Sonus faber’s recommended range, but the more relevant figures are its stability into 2-ohm loads and a damping factor above 4,000, which is the current delivery this speaker asks for. Streaming is comprehensive, with Roon Ready, AirPlay, Chromecast, Spotify and Tidal Connect, and the DAC is derived from Hegel’s flagship H600. Note it connects to the network by wired Ethernet only, a deliberate choice to keep wi-fi interference away from the audio circuits.

The H400 has no phono stage, so vinyl needs one added, and Hegel makes the obvious partner. The V10 is a dual-mono design whose moving-magnet and moving-coil inputs both use discrete low-noise JFETs, with the moving-coil stage running four in parallel to keep the noise floor exceptionally low. It offers wide gain and loading adjustment and a switchable subsonic filter. The Rega Planar 8 suits a system at this level: a skeletal Tancast 8 plinth, the RB880 tonearm with preloaded zero-tolerance bearings, and a hand-tuned Neo Mk2 power supply. Fitted with the Nd7, whose fine line nude diamond stylus has a minor radius of three microns, it stays moving-magnet and runs into the V10 with nothing complicated to set. As a Rega turntable it earths through its phono lead, so there is no ground wire to attach.

On cabling, use a well-made speaker cable of appropriate gauge for the run; AudioQuest and Chord are the cable brands we stock.

Who shouldn’t buy it

If your room is smaller, the Sonetto III G2 covers similar ground in a slimmer cabinet and will not overload the space with bass. If you want the flagship of the range, the Sonetto VIII G2 adds larger woofers, slightly higher sensitivity and a 400-watt ceiling. And if your amplifier is not genuinely comfortable driving 4 ohms, this is the wrong speaker for it regardless of its power rating.

The Sonetto V G2 weighs 33.4kg each, so positioning is a two-person job, and the concrete base gives stability without needing separate outriggers. Reviewers have had good results with the cabinets around 1.5 feet from the wall behind and roughly 8 feet apart, tweeter centre to tweeter centre, with a modest toe-in. Connect the H400 to your network by Ethernet, as it has no wi-fi. For vinyl, connect the Planar 8 to the V10 and the V10 to one of the H400’s line inputs; out of the box the V10 is configured for moving-magnet use, which suits the Nd7 without adjustment.