Sonus Faber speakers - what's your experience?

I had the Sennetto III in my house and compared them directly to Focal Aria 926.    The Sennetto bested the 926s with voice and strings.  The 926 were a little better at filling the room with music and a little better with rock music or should I say I liked them better.  But I just could not get over the cheesy plastic like base of the Sennetto.  

I have had 3 sets - Venere 3.0, Sonetto V and Olympica Nova V. 
 

I like SF. And there’s a lot of great speakers out there

I have had SF Olympica ,  Amati Tradition and now the Il Cremonese.   The fact that I stay with SF rather than switching to Wilson or Focal (both of which I have auditioned at length), indicates my satisfaction, indeed appreciation, of the SF sound.

I listen to classical and jazz so cannot speak as to SF applicability and sound in relation to rock or heavy metal.  But, for classical and jazz, they are extremely "musical" with excellent timbre, tonality, clarity, articulation throughout the frequency range.  SF claims strings are their specialty, but I can attest to the fact that while the strings are indeed outstanding, brass and percussion are equally realistic. I have compared to Wilson's and to my ears the SF are more natural, more attuned to a live performance, than the Wilson's (which I find to be highly articulate to the point of being clinical).

Note, however, that the SF speakers perform in relationship to the quality of the source, preamp, amp and speaker cables.  The better your "system" the more you will hear from the speakers... they truly are revealing and rewarding in the sense that you can appreciate any expenditures "upstream" from the speakers.  Of course, this also means that you will find yourself upgrading components and cables.

I auditioned Sonus Faber Amati’s with my Gryphon Diablo 300 at a dealer’s showroom. I compared them against B&W 801 D4 (loads of bass and upper ranges too thin), Magico A5 (very thin bass and sounded like a speaker and not musical), Audiovector Arette R6 (great speaker with very energetic and punchy bass), and Wilson Sasha DAW (beautiful speaker and to me the best of the bunch, but ultimately lacking in a fuller and well-rounded and balanced rich sound when playing hard rock). In comparison I found Sonus Faber to be decent, a better midrange than the B&W, but I found them to be a bit uninspiring to me. Could be due to the pairing with my amp, or it could have been the massively over-dampened audition room I tried them in. I thought the bass was very deep and there was lots of it, but it was less energetic than what I was hearing with other speakers, which set the stage for a less engaging experience.

I find auditioning speakers to be very stressful and often futile, due to uncontrollable variables, in particular being at the mercy of dealer listening rooms. It may very well be that I would have loved the Amati’s at home but I don’t know of any dealer near me that would allow at-home tests for floor standing speakers.

@craig , for what it’s worth, the salesman told me that near 100% of their clients who listen to jazz and classical choose Sonus Faber above the other brands they sell.