Sonus Faber V's Sonus Faber


What would you chose, if the price was identical between a shop demo pair of S F Guarneri's with a REL Sub and a pair of new S F Cremona's (no Sub) ?

What would be your deciding factor ?
kjgp
Kjgp, If you go for Guarneri's Homage you should negotiate price really hard... New Guarneri Memento will be released on CES2006 and few weeks after that it will be in showrooms(at least, here in Europe..). I am not saying that Guarneri's Homage are not good, quite the opposite!
Your amps will drive them very nicely.
BTW, prices of Guarneri Homage are allready droping in Euro market, so...
Sir,
Your 30 watt Jadis would run the Guarneris in that room just fine. I will tell you that I had more success with them in larger rooms than small ones surprisingly. They like room to breath and will play "big" in a decent size room with a bit of power on them. I think they will sound very nice in your room. Make sure you get the shorter of the two pedestals that were made for them. I think the combination of speaker and stand equals about 51"
Guarneri is in a totally different class.
I hv owned all that is worth owning in the Sonus stable and can safetly say that Cremona should not even be in comparision with Guarneri.
With or without a good sub, it just is head and shoulder above all sonuses except maybe the Stradivarius.
The two best sounding speakers Sonus Faber ever designed are the Extremas and Stradavarius. I am lucky to own both and would say these are by far head and shoulders of what's in there lineup.
Not sure if I can agree with some of the claims above.

I have owned almost every single higher end Sonus Faber made except the Stradivarius. After owning Amati for a while, Extrema, though very nice overall, just can't quite compete. The higher efficiency of Amati brings out so much more than Extrema in details, transparency, dynamics, and many other areas. You can see all the newer SF speakers having higher efficiency for the same reason.

Dynaudio Esotar is a very nice tweeter, but it does have its short coming. I have owned Dynaudio Confidence 5 for years, probably the best executed Esotar based speakers, and Amati still betters C5 overall.

I think for overall enjoyment, Cremona is a better speaker than Guarneri unless you limit your listening preference to music without bass.