Sony SS-A5
Sony SS-A5S
Sony La Voce
(1989 - 1992 - 1996)

Naturally, whenever one says "japanese loudspeaker", everybody laughs. Sure, there are oodles of european and american and italian and english and etc manufacturers, all with reputations auras the size of Florida within which some really are producing outstanding music transducers.
However, a few japanese loudspeakers did stop everybody laughing. Among others, the Yamaha NS-1000 which still is a reference and very much sought after. The 1977 NS-10 is -controversially- another one but if said japanese brands had decided to export some of their ultra models (Victor Sx-1000, Diatone DS-5000, Yamaha G-F1 etc), the story could have been different...

Well - Sony did export the SS-A5 "Voce" series but as all things high-end Sony, it was kept very discreet. Although, mind you, France, for once, decided to award it a Diapason d'Or - it was the first japanese 'speaker to ever receive that coveted award, much like the SCD-1 SACD player was the first Sony product to receive a Stereophile award. In fact, the SS-A series was built very much like any "cottage industry" loudspeaker : hand-built, hand-tweaked, using only premium materials and almost no high-tech stuff the japanese often dig.

The most high-tech element of the SS-A series is... natural : the Bio-Cellulose tweeter is threaded by bacteriae, giving in the end a driver which is stiffer than anything although thinner and lighter than anything, with a resonance peak which is way above that of Beryllium for instance. Bio-Cellulose was a joint development between Sony and Ajinomoto Co., Inc. and three corporations of the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology Research Institute for Polymers & Textiles in Japan.
The rest of the SS-A5 naturally is on par otherwise it wouldn't be as musical and supremely coherent as it is : little pieces of felt and rubber placed here and there, real wood enclosure, isolated filter made of strictly high-end components, time-aligned drivers, layout of the filter, respective Qs of the components etc.

The result is a supremely distinguished sound, somewhat reminiscent of the V-FET units and especially the TA-N7 masterpiece : pure musical bliss.

The smaller of the series (SS-A3) sold well enough to remain very easy to find but it isn't completely on par with the A5. Europe saw an even smaller model, the SS-A1, which really was a take on the famed Rogers LS3/5 BBC monitor :) The SS-A1 was built like a smaller SS-A5 and not like the slightly pared down SS-A3.
The SS-A5 initially sold well in Japan - at 90,000¥, it represented an unbeatable bargain of musicality/price ratio. The revised version (SS-A5S) didn't as much, perhaps because the improvements seemed fairly slight after all (they weren't in reality). An SS-A7 super topper was introduced along the A5S but unfortunately sold quite poorly ; its production run was set very low anyway and its price very high. Unseen & pricey = unsold.

Mostly : by 1994, the "refined audio" market was going down and HT was already lurking loudly at the horizon. Boom-boom always sold better than utter refinement, which is why all of the SS-A can be found easily and for very little money in Japan - too refined to cut a groove in the ambient noise.

Do read the extensive technical descriptions with the "more" pop-ups below to fully understand why the SS-A series really was apart from everything else. And why it still is.