Technical Features
The new Opera Quinta is an attractive and technically advanced floorstanding loudspeaker with superb musical capability. The entire project required more than a year to bring to fruition, with many unusual and original design ideas being adopted along the way. Like all Opera loudspeakers, the cabinet construction is in a beautifully hand-crafted solid hardwood, with a choice of different wood finishes. The complement of drive units is four per loudspeaker, arranged as a three-way design with twin bass units.
Each of the two 18 cm bass drive units is fitted with its own reflex chamber, a solution which, though adding complication in terms of manufacture, handsomely repays the extra effort by providing a truly convincing low register performance with great speed, depth and impact. As an added bonus, (by comparison with the more commonly used single reflex chamber arrangement), the overall system efficiency is improved. Resonance damping also benefits from the greater rigidity of this twin chamber long cabinet design. In fact, the structural integrity of the Opera Quinta is of a very high order, with a total weight in the order of 68,50 lbs.(31 kg) for the very substantial hardwood cabinet, which is therefore well able to cope with the demands placed upon the loudspeaker during serious heavy listening. Resonance damping is further aided by a careful choice of the internal acoustic absorbent material, a lead-layer composite for the bass chambers and a combed acrylic blanket for the sealed midrange chamber.
The drive units are made to our precise design by one of Europe’s finest custom drive unit builders; in the case of the bass units the cone material is treated cellulose, while a special copolymer is specified for the midrange driver. The mid-driver is unlike those found in most loudspeakers, which are typically an adapted mid-woofer. The 13cm midrange unit used in the Opera Quinta is designed and made to cover its own precisely defined mid-frequency band. The copolymer cone material is extremely light, but with the required degree of rigidity and flexibility to ensure a smooth and uniform response. Only the treble unit is a standard component, an excellent close tolerance silk dome model from Seas of Norway.
In the choice of crossover frequencies we have taken an unorthodox
approach in order to obtain the widest and most stable image throughout
the full acoustic spectrum. This is
helped by a small but finely calibrated slope of the loudspeaker’s
front baffle. The
crossover itself is physically split into separate sections for bass
and midrange, to avoid
any possible interaction between the two. High quality, close tolerance
components are chosen for the crossover sections and included self-cementing
inductors for guaranteed stability under all conditions. Twin pairs
of Opera’s own heavy duty input terminals are fitted, providing
the option of bi-wiring or passive bi-amping as required.
The sound provided by the Opera Quinta is generous in scale, convincing
in all the important musical parameters and above all, pleasing to the
ear.