Photos by Tony Cordoza
Silver fever is spreading throughout the A/V world. It first reared up in small components like DVD players. Next, TVs with shiny cabinets started to appear in all shapes and sizes. Now the metal bug has finally worked its way into speakers, with companies turning out silver-cased systems that would look right at home in the living room of T-1000, the cop-suited robot from Terminator 2.
Given the current mania for all things silver, a metal-toned rig like this Canton Karat series system ($4,250) is likely to be a good match for any other new gear that you buy. And it looks extremely cool. At first I was wary of the Cantons’ severe facade, but once I set up the slender towers and worked the rest of the system into my room, I was surprised by how well it blended in — the speakers seemed to disappear. Even the Karat AS 200 C subwoofer maintains a slim profile — it’s less than a foot wide — which isn’t easy to pull off in a relatively big box harboring a down-firing 10-inch driver.
Measuring a mere 5 1/2 inches wide, the Karat S 8 DC front left/right speaker breaks new ground for a slim tower design. The ported, three-way speaker stands just over 3 feet tall and has a side-firing 8-inch woofer. On the front panel, a 1-inch tweeter is sandwiched between two 5-inch midrange drivers (the nominal size includes the surrounds and baskets), all of them covered by black fabric grilles. Its two pairs of input terminals accept spade lugs or bare wire and can be biwired or biamped if you remove the attached jumpers. Each speaker rests on a black MDF base and comes with spikes for coupling it to a carpet.
The CS 4 center speaker is a sealed, two-way design with the same front-panel driver configuration as the tower, but there’s no woofer on the side, so the dual 5-inch drivers handle both bass and midrange duties. Canton’s compact Karat S1 bookshelf model serves as the surround speaker for the system. A two-way ported design, the S1 also sports a 5-inch midrange/bass driver and a 1-inch tweeter. As with the S 8 DC tower, the terminals on both the center and surround speakers accept spade lugs or bare wire. The Karat AS 200C subwoofer’s controls include level and phase adjustments and a crossover that’s variable between 50 and 150 Hz.
Since I use a front projector to handle video in our 14 x 20-foot testing room, I positioned the S 8 DC towers at either side of the 80-inch-wide screen — a reasonably spacious spread. The CS 4 went on a low stand directly beneath the screen, and I put the S 1 surrounds on speaker stands near the back corners of the room, angling them in slightly toward the listening position. The AS 200 C slipped into a front corner normally occupied by a massive B&W subwoofer. Standing in that void, the Canton sub looked slimmer than ever — I began to wonder if it would be up to the task of flooding the room with bass.
My reservations about bass extended to the S 8 DC towers, which looked way too lean to deliver any serious low end. But when I cued up music and started listening in stereo without any assistance from the subwoofer, I was stopped in my tracks: not only did the S 8 DCs have great low-end extension, but the bass was very tight and clean. The wide distance separating the speakers in our room also seemed to help their imaging. In Richard Thompson’s “King of Bohemia” from Mirror Blue, the Canton towers delivered a convincing representation of the acoustic space the singer was performing in when he recorded the album. Listening with my eyes closed, it seemed like he was standing about 10 feet in front of me.
The main thing that struck me about Canton’s towers was how clean and present their sound was. Depending on the recording, this could be either a plus or a minus. The electroacoustic jazz on the Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones CD sounded great on the S 8 DCs, which did an admirable job of rendering dense layers of acoustic bass and reverb-laden guitar. But on some newer rock recordings, like “No One Knows” from Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf — the kind that likely get a high EQ boost during mastering to make them more radio-friendly — the Cantons’ sound definitely fell on the forward side of the fence.
I also had a minor gripe with the height of the S 8 DC. Since the speaker is only about 3 feet tall, its tweeter is about 2 1/2 feet up from the floor — chest-level when I’m sitting on a couch. No matter what I played, the sound had a “low” perspective, rising up toward my ears instead of hitting them straight on.
Getting back to bass, the S 8 DC tower/ AS 200 SC subwoofer combination turned out to be a real powerhouse. Playing “The Exploding Psychology” from Squarepusher’s Go Plastic CD, an electronic-music track that seems composed to tax the dynamic abilities of speakers, the Canton trio weathered the pounding storm of beats, bass, and blips without breaking a sweat. Even at very loud volumes, the AS 200 SC sounded remarkably clean and tight. With a standard THX crossover point of 80 Hz dialed in on my processor, the sub also blended very smoothly with the towers both on music and on movie soundtracks.
Given the trio’s handling of Squarepusher, I was hardly surprised by the full Canton system’s performance with the new Led Zeppelin DVD. Unlike most concert recordings on DVD, the 5.1-channel mix of “Whole Lotta Love” doesn’t make you feel like you’re in a crowd watching the performance — it goes a step further and plunges you into the performance. It sounds like you’re teetering on the edge of the Royal Albert Hall stage in 1970. The S1 surrounds readily contributed to this sense of sonic immersion and also did a good job handling their share of the Ping-Pong effects that cap off Jimmy Page’s guitar solo. On the whole, the system easily delivered the thunderous, God-like slam of the Led Zep rhythm section, a truly unique phenomenon that this DVD captures.
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The Canton system’s squeaky-clean performance proved to be a great asset for a movie with a complex soundtrack, like Phone Booth. Since most of this thriller takes place in an actual booth, director Joel Schumacher relies on audio to drive the story of a sleazebag PR flack (Colin Farrell) who’s stalked by a psychopath, sometimes weaving multiple tracks of dialogue through a single scene. Even with several voices coming at me at once from different speakers, each shred of dialogue was intelligible. The off-center performance of the CS 4 center speaker was also very good, displaying only a mild shift in timbre when I slid to one side of the couch.
If you’re looking for slender, stylish speakers that don’t compromise on performance, Canton’s Karat system won’t disappoint you. It offers ultraclean sound along with bone-rattling bass, and its high-tech look makes it a natural companion for a flat-panel plasma or LCD TV. At a little over four grand, it isn’t cheap, but in many ways these Karats are worth their weight in silver.
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