Franco Serblin Accordo Goldberg

As founder and chief designer of Sonus Faber, Franco Serblin designed and manufactured many loudspeakers of acclaimed high quality, mainly in box form.

- MARTIN COLLOMS

Nevertheless, he remained painfully aware that such conventional rectangular parallelepiped constructions inevitably possessed an inherent and hard-to-suppress resonant signature characteristic of box-form cabinetry, significantly differing from that for a musical instrument. Franco had long obsessed over the sound and construction of classical string instruments, violins, violas, and cellos made by grand masters over centuries. He valued highly those richly resonant, expressive, complex sonic signatures.

Most loudspeakers have, to some degree, a characteristic voice or color, partly stemming from their materials and construction. While designers have become skilled in controlling those voices, especially working to decolorize enclosures, some of that characteristic parallelepiped structural signature remains; we sometimes use the word "boxy" to describe this. Such an acoustic signature is largely foreign to a musical instrument, and if noticeably present, may impair the sound.

Painstaking trials by Serblin led to the development of elaborate enclosures that moved beyond the typical box commonly tasked with containing an air space and supporting the drive units. He advanced the concept of a working acoustic structure whose behavior relating to vibration, and the resulting sound radiation, would be well-controlled and musically consonant. Even the Ancients knew that curved structures sound more harmonious and consonant with the timbre of a musical instrument. Over decades or more, there has been a search for harmony with an absence of challenging "wolf" tones.