Kudos Cardea C10 Bookshelf speakers
Small 12-liter shelf speakers are made in a classic style: rectangular cabinets, a circuit with the lowest possible (for these speakers) crossover filters, high-level speakers themselves. The SEAS Excel "Crescendo" T29CF002 soft dome made of SONOMEX material with a sustained constant thickness and weight of 0.35 g is responsible for reproducing the high-frequency spectrum. It is controlled by a magnetic system of six radially magnetized rare earth NdFeB magnets (neodymium, iron, boron). Woofer/midrange driver - SEAS Prestige H1455-08 ER15RLY with a 5-inch fiber-reinforced paper pulp diaphragm, weighing 7.6 g. The voice coil is wound with bimetallic copper-aluminum wire. The crossovers use Clarity Cap SA capacitors, selected with a minimum variation in parameters. The internal wiring is made with a cable manufactured by Chord Company. Switching of speaker cables is carried out on one pair of large gold-plated Michell Engineering terminals. The cabinets of the speakers are made of 18 mm multilayer MDF boards. A small bass reflex port is located at the top of the rear panel of the speaker cabinet. Unlike the exclusive pink walnut finish for the previous C20 floor pair, the younger model is dressed in a simpler way - in a fairly ordinary black ash veneer, albeit with a pleasant satin surface and lively pattern.
From the first measures, Cardea C10 fully confirms the family resemblance to floor C20s - the extracted sound is characterized by sharpness and contrast, moving mids, as well as dryish, needle-like and very collected bass. The lower case as a whole shows good transparency and attack, as well as a complete lack of heaviness. However, a closer listen reveals some differences. In principle, the Cardea C20 was also characterized by some subtlety of timbres and slightly muffled overtones and noise overtones, as a result of which subtle timbre differences were not always felt clearly. But there the sound was a little more even, the elegance of timbres never turned into sharpness. Here, when the speakers are turned towards the listener, some bright and active instruments (trumpet, organ) sound a little muffled and somehow without pretensions to leadership, while the violins, on the contrary, are clearly accentuated by the forte.
On the whole, if when choosing recordings one is guided not by complex symphonic music and not by hard metal genres, but is limited to a variety of popular music of this and past decades, this model demonstrates a distinct separate sound, quite worthy tempo-rhythmically, with proportional images and good detail. There is a feeling that Kudos Cardea C10 will work well with tube amplifiers, and the results of measurements in our laboratory confirm this assumption.
