Despite looking sort of like the furniture from the Swedish chain, the Soft Collective SC‑05 loudspeaker is kind of the anti-Ikea loudspeaker. OK, not entirely, in that it is made in Sweden and has a pale wooden finish. But it’s very un-Ikea-like is its solid-birch construction. The same could be said for its distinctive design, which was developed in cooperation with Gärsnäs, a company that’s been making furniture in Stockholm since 1893. The price tag of €20,000 per pair is very not-Ikea (all prices in euros). And you certainly don’t have to assemble the speakers yourself.
Soft Collective was presenting the SC‑05 on the international stage for the first time at Audio Video Show 2025. The young Swedish firm was sharing a room with Danish electronics manufacturer Zikra Audio—more on them in a bit. Here in their small exhibition room in the Radisson Blu Sobieski hotel, I spoke with Gunnar Hildén about the SC‑05’s unique design and the company’s philosophy.
I learned that the speaker owes its unusual look and construction to its multiple-open-baffle design. By placing the large 18″ woofer on the rear baffle and the two 7″ midrange-woofers (Hildén referred to them as “wide-range drivers”) and tweeter on the front baffle, Soft Collective is able to achieve the sort of bass response of a much larger open-baffle design. Yet the acoustic centers of all the drivers fit within an area of about 14″. That’s quite a feat on its own, given the woofer is larger than that, but a further benefit is that the drivers can all be easily time-aligned with simple crossover components.
Hildén further explained the integrated stand tilts the SC‑05 back on a four-degree angle, which is optimized for a listening position about 10′ away. Since the hotel room in Warsaw was too small to allow that kind of spacing, the Soft Collective folks simply added spikes to get a few extra degrees of tilt. So, despite its low-slung look, the SC‑05 is designed to operate properly in a normal room, with no need to get the tweeters up at ear level.
The bespoke Scandinavian furniture look and unorthodox acoustic design is cool and all, but it begs the question—does it work? Yup. Despite the small room dimensions, the little SC‑05s lit the place up with an airy, spacious sound that never got jumbled or congested. Those 18″ woofers provided ample bass, and there was not a hint of harshness, whether they were playing orchestral strings or rock music. Hildén emphasized this as a matter of Soft Collective’s philosophy. The “soft” in the name comes from the belief that real string instruments never have a hard sound. I’ll reiterate, though, that I was most impressed by how these almost-cute speakers in this really small room made it sound like a huge space. The soundstage was wide and high, and the imaging was sharper and more focused than the look of the speakers might indicate.
As the SC‑05 is said to have a sensitivity of about 92dB at 1W input and a nominal impedance of 8 ohms, it’s pretty happy to play with tubes. At the Warsaw show, the SC‑05s were fronted by the highest-specified version Zikra Audio’s 300B tube amplifier, with amorphous transformer cores and silver internal wiring. Tracking down the price of this truly high-end amp proved difficult, but it seems to be somewhere between €15,000 and €20,000. Rated at 17Wpc, the single-ended triode design is just powerful enough for the SC‑05, but Hildén cautioned Soft Collective owners not to go any lower than that. The two-chassis Zikra preamplifier was even more expensive, with reported prices between €35,000 and €40,000, but was just as impressive as the power amp. The preamp features an onboard LCR phono preamp, which means it uses inductors in addition to capacitors and resistors to do the RIAA equalization. A Technics SP‑10-based Zikra turntable (starting at €7000) and the Wavelight server and Wavedream DAC from Romania’s Rockna Electronics (Hildén didn’t have the prices, sorry) completed the system’s front end. Soft Collective’s well-constructed equipment racks, which retail for €2000 apiece and feature customizable damping via springs, soft pads, or both, held everything in place.
Locally-sourced solid birch, a fantastically bizarre open baffle design that actually works, a collaboration with an old-school Swedish furniture firm—all this means the Soft Collective SC‑05 speaker is a far cry from the mass-produced stuff from that big blue-and-yellow chain. The fact that it sounds better than many of the more orthodox sealed- or ported-box monopoles at Audio Video Show that cost as much or more make it as good a deal as a Kallax shelf or a Kyrre stool, though.
Matt Bonaccio
Contributor, SoundStage!
