Audiodrom - YG Acoustics Sonja 2.3i

YG Acoustics, like their biggest rival Magico, looks more like an Airbus assembly hall - and not just because they use the same milling machines - than a loudspeaker manufacturer. Everything is milled from aircraft aluminum and joined by pressing instead of traditional screws and bolts. The individual components that make up the YG are numbered in the thousands, and the company goes so far as to mill the diaphragms of individual transducers from aluminium.

Function and form

ERGONOMIE 98%
SOUND 94%
PROCESSING 100%

It takes 15 kWh of energy and 1000 l of water to produce 1 kg of aluminium. Not to mention the other machining. Together, the two Sonja 2.3i towers weigh 410 kg and are essentially all-aluminium. As such, at first glance they don't look like candidates for sustainable speaker system of the year, but it's important to remember that they don't consume tons of epoxy resins and binders, and that all the aluminum trimmings go back for recycling. If the YG ever runs out of life in the future, the aluminium monsters can be recycled again without any problems, unlike painted wooden and laminated cabinets. Thus, they are greener than they may seem.

The cornerstone of YG loudspeakers has been two technologies based on three-dimensional CNC for years: the ForgeCore, which concerns the magnetic system/inverter motors, and the BilletCore, which concerns the diaphragms. You'll find ForgeCore in tweeter silk calottes, where it optimizes the motor's seating in the transducer structure and - according to YG Acoustics - dramatically reduces distortion. BilletCore is in the name of membrane milling. Yes, you read correctly, the aluminium diaphragms of all four cones in the Sonja 2.3i, i.e. 2x26cm woofers and 2x15cm midrange drivers), are created by removing material from the aluminium block. As a result, the 7 kg heavy aluminium sheet is reduced to a weight of only 30 g and a thickness of 200 µm. Compared to conventional molded diaphragms, the YG offers greater load capacity and better distortion characteristics, and from a sonic perspective, lightning-fast transient response and dynamics.

The upper module (tweeter and two midrange drivers) are mounted in a d'Appolito configuration, and in a concave curvature so that the acoustic axes of the drivers meet at the listener's ears. Vertical symmetry means not only a more even behaviour in the upper two thirds of the frequency curve, but also better (read less) interaction of the drivers with the floor and ceiling.

All five drivers in the speaker system are handled by a frequency and phase optimised switch. DualCoherent Crossover, as YG calls it, is tuned for a maximum dispersion of +/-1 dB from a ruler-straight frequency response, and a maximum of +/-5° shifts in relative phase. These are remarkable parameters, and in particular the effort the company puts into phase correctness is really audible. The Sonja 2.3i features a new second-generation switch (Dual Coherent Mk2) that uses proprietary ViseCoil coils in the bass and ToroAir in the midrange, which YG says improves linearity, eliminates crosstalk, and firms up the bass.

The Sonja 2.3i is a fully passive loudspeaker, specified to 4ohm at 88dB sensitivity. You can have it in chrome (ChromALure), any anodization or painted in a colour of your choice. The surface swatch looks very attractive indeed. The cabinets are, of course, an all-aluminium masterpiece. Sonja are, with the exception of the calotte, a de facto all-metal affair from head to toe. Moreover, they are modular. You can start with just a small rackmount monitor (2.1i), later buy a bass section (2.2i), and even later replace the bass section with a dual bass section (2.3i).

Low frequencies

WEIGHT 94%
EXPLOSIVITY 94%
ARTICULATION 95%

Evaluating Sonja 2.3i loudspeakers is a considerable challenge even for an experienced listener, let alone a weekend listener. If you're used to making up your mind in twenty minutes, you'll probably come away thinking that maybe it has potential, but that you've heard better. But if you're looking for speakers that will entertain you day after day and year after year, give them more than twenty minutes. YG Acoustics obviously do some things differently and the result is worth it.

Pink noise reproduction can also be added to this. I know, I'm annoying with him sometimes, but when he tells you so much. The difference between correlated and uncorrelated noise (Sheffield Labs test track) was the smallest I have ever heard in any loudspeaker. Better said - except for the mono-stereo difference, there was no difference between the two tracks at all. The sound was totally coherent in both cases and tonally I didn't notice any excesses. This is not surprising for the midrange section, which is 20 cm wide and 50 cm high, so you can expect a monitor-correct sound. But even the next two downward extensions didn't mean any change of balance for the noise, it just started to rumble more.

Another thing that YG Acoustics has mastered very well is the bass. At first glance, you'd think there's not enough of it. Well, yeah, but then you measure it and there it is, coming on full force from 20 Hz at the listening point, and behaving in a patterned fashion until the mid-band (measured by the 20 Hz - 200 Hz fluctuating spectrum) takes over. No wonder then that I really enjoyed the acoustic double bass. Everything was there - the fingers, the strings, the fingerboard, the body. I even felt like I could see a spike through the Sonja 2.3i, scraping the planks of the wooden floor. I absolutely fell in love with the double bass through YG, mainly because it was a truly acoustic instrument in their performance, without amplification, without the nice lighting and overblowing, without the usually praised "tightening"... just call it what you want, but this was very real and I dare say it was the most faithful (I'm not saying the most attractive) reproduction of a double bass I've ever heard through any audio system so far. And the listening room was a relatively modest 35 m2 of floor space. That's what I call performance.

Resolution clarity

DETAIL 95%
AIR 94%
96% TRANSPARENCY

Cassandra Wilson and her Come On My Kitchen has been another stalwart of my setlist since I first gasped at this track a long time ago via the semi-active Legacy Audio Aeris (time flies). The Sonja 2.3i is a completely passive loudspeaker and, as I have already mentioned, YG Acoustics takes a different approach to sound and tries to make the sound travel to the listener's ears as evenly as possible and without phase rolls. Not surprisingly, the individual components of the bass spectrum are perfectly clear, they don't mask each other, the track maintains excellent instrumental separation, it's smooth to the ears and easy to listen to.

Another high-end benchmark, Rebecca Pidgeon and Spanish Harlem. I won't gush about the double bass again (though I could), but I'll mention the vocals for a change. It was impeccably articulated, with beautiful ambience and perfectly managed hisses. The YG's elevation callousness is more subtle than, say, the lightning-fast AirMotion tapes, with a hint of subjective light roll-off at the very top. It reminded me a lot of the Vivid Audio speech, which works with aluminum calottes in a fairly subtle setting. As a result, the reproduction on top is smooth and fluid, giving the impression of riding in a luxury limousine.

Tonal fidelity

TEAMBR 87%
DYNAMICS 91%
TIMING 93%

Domique Fils-Aimé and Birds is interesting with dynamic percussion peaks and percussive claps. It's solid, it's precise, it's dynamic. Despite the Sonja 2.3i, the transients have the necessary hardness and speed, yet they don't try to cut your ears off and basically come across as refined and understated in their own way. Cultivation is one of the distinguishing features of YG. It's worth repeating that at first glance these are probably not the kind of loudspeakers that would make you jump up and run for your credit card after a few minutes. They're too good for that. Read Jeremy Clarkson's book I Know You've Got Soul and you'll understand that you'll only appreciate a true technical gem when you've lived with it for a while. And so I, too, many weeks and many speakers later, found myself unwittingly returning to the YG Acoustics sound philosophy over and over again in my mind. I fell into the trap of having to admit, willy-nilly, that the power of their expression is in the sheer non-confrontational neutrality with which they send program material, encoded in files and carved in grooves, to our ears, and that they do it better than most.

Probably the best recording for evaluating the ability of audio components to faithfully render space can be found on the Chesky Records No.2 sampler and is called the General Image and Resolution Test. I've written about it many times, as it belongs in my permanent testing arsenal. The musicians, circling their instruments around a single microphone, ascended through the Sonja 2.3i in the front position all the way to my seat; one felt like reaching out and touching the nearest one. It's trickier in the back extreme position, where reflections and the usual proximity to the back wall play a big role, so the musicians' orbit was rather ellipsoidal. Either way, it was again one of the best reproductions of this track ever. Again, in a space with a normal floor area.

Spatiality

THREE-DIMENSIONALITY 95%
SCENE WIDTH 95%
SCENE DEPTH 95%

It is very instructive to explore - through the YG Acoustics Sonja 2.3i - the differences between high-end digital and high-end vinyl.

The Celebrating 95 Years Of Elac sampler was available as 180g DMM vinyl and as a UHQ Hi-Res file. You will find some great pieces - Rutter's Requiem, Natalia Merchant, Agnes Obel, Anette Askvik or the energetic duo Rodrigo y Gabriela. You get a beautiful acoustic amalgam and richly coloured music with a lot going on in all layers. YG manages to separate all the action in the individual tracks perfectly and lock it all down with great control in the space of the recording and in the space of the listening room. It's striking, for example, how in Requiem soprano Nancy Keith doesn't struggle with one of the largest Fisk organ systems in the Meyerson Symphony Center, where the recording was made, even though the organ puts up a huge wall of sound in the room. Both worlds have something in common in a purely high-end version, but without wishing to offend anyone, digital clearly had the upper hand in this case. Vinyl centricity and the presence of distortion of all kinds did mean some charming tonality and physicality, but much of the information would remain drowned in the noise of the groove. This is not a treatise on the differences between the formats, it just follows from the simple fact that the Sonja 2.3i's are so transparent that these differences are clearly audible through them, and they can respond very sensitively to changes in the input, just as they were sensitive to degradation in the digital feed through the XDuoo portable transport, which couldn't even remotely measure up to a dedicated Taiko streamer.

If you're afraid of thin and sharp sound - and the overabundance of aluminum on the soundboard and transducers may tempt you to do so - know that the YG Acoustics Sonja 2.3i are closer to the Italian school of sound than to the American adrenaline school, only they eliminate the Italian school's primordial prettiness and romanticism.

In a slim silhouette, you get a bravura, balanced sound with excellent headroom, tight and clear bass, subtle highs and a detailed eye for nuance in recordings. The Sonja 2.3i play with absolute confidence and there is a great sense of reserve towards the components - you know that if you don't want to you don't have to, but you can.

One (sympathetic) thing in conclusion; I mentioned that Sonja is a modular system that allows you to gradually expand the basic midrange module. The company is aware that it's not enough to just add bass sections, but that the whole system needs to be re-tuned. Switch upgrades are therefore part of the price of the add-on modules. There is no need to send the speakers anywhere, the changes will be made by a technician at your home. Even so, the service is to be expected given the price of YG products.

PRICE AT THE TIME OF REVIEW: 3 700 000,- CZK

Recommendations to dealers

Dreamaudio , Bratislava, +421 907 838 806
Manufacturer's website: https://www.yg-acoustics.com

Connected components

Source components Taiko Audio SGM Extreme streamer, Pilium Devine Line DAC Elektra, Paul Pang Quad Switch, Kuzma Stabi R, 4Point Single arm, DS Audio Grand Master cartridge, DS Audio Equalizer, xDuoo X10T II digital transport
Amplifiers: Pilium Devine Line Ares preamplifier, Pilium Hercules monoblocks
Interconnects and speaker cables: Siltech Triple Crown, Vyda Laboratories Orion, InAkustik Toslink
Filtration and network: Pilium DCF, Torus Power AVR2 16, Siltech Ruby Mountain, DS Audio ION-001