Aussie gold
Meet the most enjoyable standmounts we’ve heard in yonks. Equally pleasing, they’re home-grown, in Perth, WA.
We first encountered March Audio in 2020, when it had released a series of amplifiers from its headquarters in Perth, WA, and had just begun using power modules from Denmark’s Purifi (see panel overleaf). One of March Audio’s amps, the P452 stereo power amplifier (now called the P422), went on to win a Sound+Image Award.
But Purifi in Denmark also makes an unusual new design of loudspeaker driver. And when Alan March tried out this 6.5-inch Purifi driver, it proved to be just the thing he was seeking to achieve a speaker design he was developing.
“We had analysed all the usual suspects, but this Purifi driver was truly exceptional,” says Alan March. “It is the lowest-distortion longest-stroke driver of its size; indeed its performance exceeds that of far larger drivers. It also has extremely low compression, so sounds very dynamic; it doesn’t limit the volume of transients.”
March Audio’s design objective was to build a standmount speaker — though not ‘bookshelf’ small in size — that has deep bass extension.
“Many available speakers in this class simply don’t go low enough, in my view,” says Alan March. “While people can always add a subwoofer to small speakers, this is in reality very problematic and difficult to implement properly.”
We’ve been looking forward to hearing the result, and now here they are, a pair of March Audio Sointuva WG loudspeakers in a beautiful real-wood finish.
Build & features
The 6.5-inch driver is not the only Purifi driver in the Sointuva, but the others are hidden around the back: a pair of Purifi’s 6.5-inch passive radiators, performing the same job as a rear port in decompressing the internal air ‘spring’ within what is otherwise a sealed cabinet. The result, says March, is “tight and controlled bass similar to a closed design, but with the better low frequency