Opera Loudspeakers Mezza

Opera Mezza v2 is the smallest speaker in the Classica line. Featuring a two-way bookshelf design with a rear bass-reflex port, it uses drivers developed in collaboration with specialized companies. Its compactness, versatility, and impressive performance, especially in the vocal range, make it a benchmark in its category.

Cabinet

The first step in the design of Opera Mezza was to minimize any coloration caused by vibrations and internal reflections. Our team carefully refined the cabinet proportions, starting with the use of a front panel as thick as 4 centimeters, an essential element for ensuring rigidity and control.

Due to the compact size of the speaker, internal reflections could have negatively affected the midrange frequencies, a particularly delicate and crucial part of the audio spectrum. Addressing this issue allowed us to preserve the natural character of the musical message, enhancing clarity, ambient detail, and the precision of the soundstage.

The rear reflex port, although small, adds body to the low frequencies. As with other models in the line, it is located on the back of the cabinet; we therefore recommend placing the speaker at least 20 centimeters away from the rear wall for optimal performance.

Drivers

The collaboration between Opera Loudspeakers and Scan-Speak led to the development of a custom midwoofer designed specifically for this project, with parameters finely tuned to strike the perfect balance between extension, control, and dynamics.
The generously sized voice coil and the diaphragm’s linear excursion provide excellent power handling, even at lower frequencies. The use of an aluminum diaphragm reduces moving mass and avoids high-frequency resonances, which simplifies the crossover design and improves tonal clarity.
The tweeter, also based on a Scan-Speak design, features a significantly reinforced motor structure to ensure superior control, especially in the midrange. The result is a fast and natural transient response, further enhanced by an acoustically optimized phase behavior that emphasizes microdynamics and attack precision.

Crossover

The crossover was developed following a detailed analysis of the cabinet dimensions and the elimination of internal standing waves. The design is deliberately simple, but made with audiophile-grade components and extreme attention to detail, ensuring tonal coherence and precise frequency response.

Special care was given to both the acoustic behavior of each section and the phase alignment between the two drivers, optimized for both on-axis and off-axis performance. This results in a spatially accurate and realistic reproduction, with a wide and well-defined soundstage in a real-world environment.

Air-core inductors with low-resistance copper wire are used to minimize series resistance, while the damping resistors are carefully selected to optimize both frequency response and phase behavior.

Design Philosophy

Designing an eight-liter loudspeaker using a midwoofer with an effective diameter of only 105 mm is a fairly classic approach in speaker engineering. However, it is far from simple: it requires careful and often counterintuitive design decisions. Many manufacturers focus on maximizing low-frequency extension through aggressive bass reflex tuning, often at the expense of damping and power handling. We chose a different path: to find the ideal balance between low-end extension and control, without relying on extreme driver parameters that could compromise system reliability.

The result is a compact yet solid loudspeaker, with a frequency response that goes beyond flat on-axis performance, delivering real-world results that impress. Its compact footprint, flexible placement options, and remarkable vocal reproduction make it a true benchmark in terms of tonal balance and acoustic performance.