Sony SA-20F

The Falcon systems were made to celebrate Sony's adventure into the leasing of Falcon jet planes which started in 1977.

Even less remembered than the Precise P7 system, the Falcon separates made somewhat swift appearances in the catalogs here and there, only to vanish just as rapidly.

The SA-20F is a self-powered loudspeaker with three high-tech elements : ribbon tweeter, Heat-Pipe cooling and conical woofer with vertical plane.
The FB version is the same but for the color : dark brown instead of silver - exteremly rare, I have never seen any, not even in Japan.


The ribbon tweeter is made of a film membrane etched with a pure aluminum foil : low-mass but rigid, with high power handling and impedance.

The Heat-Pipe is placed between the woofer's center pole and the bass-reflex port : the effective and instantaneous cooling allows better efficiency and better power handling, equal to that of a much bigger enclosure/woofer tandem.

The Vertical, solid conical woofer was a way of previewing the future APM speakers : less edge distortion, more accurate piston movement, no cavity effect and increased dispersion. The latter feature being important here since the crossover frequency is a high 3,5Khz !
The "acoustically transparent" conical membrane is made of "sound-diffusing material"...

The amplifier has a dual-FET differential-amplifier input and DC, true-complementary-symmetry SEPP output - yes.
The enclosure is made of SBMC with a diecast aluminium back heatsink for the amplifier.

The SA-20F can either be used as intended with its built-in power-amp through an RCA input or as a passive speaker with two (small) speaker terminals ; the sound of the power-amp can also be derived to another loudspeaker by way of those terminals as well.

The supplied cables are made of three wires (audio L, audio R and AC power) with a special 3-prong terminal which can be hooked directly to the TAE-20F preamplifier... but not all TAE-20F have those terminals so beware !

A fairly useless "acoustic compensator" allows to boost bass level in six 1dB steps ; providing a simple input level pot would have been more useful there : there is plenty of bass already !


In reality, the woofer's added membrane is fairly heavy and doesn't sound that acoustically transparent ; the tweeter however has a very wide dispersion indeed and both together can really take and output loads of power.

From what I hear of my SA-20F and SA-10F pairs, I think a full recap' and restoration of the amplifier's parts should be necessary to bring the intended best out of them.

The SA-20F was also available as SS-5GX, separately from the Falcon systems, but the two are fairly different.