 Canton
Ergo 702 DC Loudspeakers
Glance through the audio magazines and websites and
you’d be forgiven for assuming that there are only a few loudspeaker manufacturers
doing business today. Yet if you then actually walk onto the sales floors of most
retailers, you’ll have a hard time finding most of the brands you’ve just read
about.
In reality, loudspeaker manufacturers are proliferating
faster than just about any other occupation -- with the possible exceptions of Elvis
impersonators and bloggers. Yet not all of the loudspeaker companies you’ll see on
the sales floor are Johnny-come-latelies. Take Canton, for example, a German
engineering-based speaker company that has been quietly building ambitious and affordable
products since 1973.
Canton was founded to "produce the best
loudspeaker," says Frank Gobl, chief of research and development for the company.
Gobl probably should have added "within reason" to that phrase -- Canton
doesn’t produce any cost-no-logic "flagship" products. However, because the
company is vertically integrated, not only designing its products in-house but
manufacturing most of its component parts as well, it has a tremendous amount of control
over the performance quality of its offerings, and melds its command of loudspeaker
technology with a healthy dose of bang for the buck.
I discovered that for myself when I used to sell hi-fi for
a living. I worked at several stores that did not sell Canton, and it seemed that no
matter what I showed customers, there was a similar Canton model that ran a few hundred
bucks less per pair. I really began to hate the question "How do those compare to the
Canton model XXXes?"
Canton’s savvy PR guy, Gordon Sell, knows how to set a
hook. He dangled a pair of Ergo 702 DCs in front of me, saying, "Here’s a
floorstanding two-and-a-half-way loudspeaker that retails for considerably less than
$2000/pair. Want to be the first to review it?"
"Canton used to really beat me up on the sales
floor," I muttered.
"If they’re as good as I think they are,
you’ll be a hero for discovering them. If they aren’t, you can have fun taking
the bread out of the mouths of honest loudspeaker engineers."
You know you’ve been in the business too long when the
PR guys start to play you like that. How could I say no? I requested review samples.
Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) --
René Descartes
The Ergo 702 DC is 35.4"H by 8.5"W by
11.3"D and, although it looks like a conventional rectangular tower, the internal
walls are canted out of true to reduce the chances of their developing internal standing
waves. In addition, the front-ported cabinet is rigidly braced and damped to minimize
resonance, particularly in the mid- to high-frequency ranges.
It looks good, too. My review pair came in a handsome
cherry finish nicely set off by black pierced-metal grilles, which I stored neatly off to
one side, preferring the 702 DC’s sound without them,
About that "DC" designation: It stands for
Canton’s Displacement Control technology, a fourth-order high-pass filter designed
for ported loudspeakers that prevents the bass driver from attempting to reproduce signals
below its frequency response. Attempting to reproduce those sounds can generate high
levels of harmonic distortion in the range that the drivers do generate, the
distortion generally perceived as a "blatty" tonal quality. Canton says that DC
allows their ported speakers to provide clear, linear bass reproduction at much lower
frequencies than non-DC speakers could attain.
The Ergo 702 DC has a "two-and-a-half-way"
crossover -- a cute way of saying that it combines attributes of both two- and three-way
designs. The 702 DC employs Canton’s slick 1" aluminum-manganese dome
tweeter mounted between two 7" aluminum-cone drivers. What makes it a
"two-and-a-half-way" design is the way the signals are routed to those 7"
drivers: the top one is dedicated to everything from 300Hz down, while the bottom one
handles everything from 3.5kHz down.
The crossover network is based on the technology developed
for Canton’s signature Karat Reference 2 DC loudspeaker system -- which combines a
12dB/octave acoustic rolloff in the tweeter with an electronic 12dB/octave slope to create
a 24dB filter -- and uses ICW polypropylene capacitors, which have reduced dielectric
absorption or "memory" effect (translation: better transient response and
detail). The crossover design also reduces microphony, Canton claims, with a resultant
improvement in midrange and high-frequency reproduction.
Particular attention has also been paid to smoothing out
the 702 DC’s impedance -- which makes it easier to drive.
Canton’s AMT 25 tweeter (the name is shorthand for
Aluminum-Manganese Tweeter with a diameter of 25mm, or 1") is a pretty interesting
critter. Its dome and former are made from a single piece of aluminum-manganese, which
makes the assembly stronger and lighter than a two-piece unit. It can also reproduce
higher frequencies and withstand higher temperatures than a two-piece assembly. The AMT 25
also has a double ferrite magnet structure and a narrow voice-coil gap to improve
efficiency.
The midrange/woofer and woofer are also pretty fly. The
aluminum "membrane" of the cone itself is thicker near the voice coil than at
the edges of the driver, which allows Canton’s engineers to optimize the cone’s
mass and stiffness. A concave dustcap of the same alloy provides an uninterrupted
diaphragm surface, which, Canton claims, "creates a more ideal linearity and better
sound dispersion."
Polycarbonate baskets provide the 702 DC’s
mid/woofers with superior damping and high stiffness, Canton claims. They hasten to point
out that they use plastic not as a cost-cutting device, but because these baskets
"continue to prove themselves by offering superior performance to metal."
The Ergo 702 DC is biwirable; its high-quality binding
posts are mounted low on the rear panel for discreet but easy access.
Audito, ergo sum (I listen, there I am) -- Wes
Phillips
I auditioned the Cantons in several systems, ranging from a
modest Portal Panache integrated amplifier to one comprising the McCormack UDP-1 universal
audio/video player, Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista preamplifier, and darTZeel NHB-108 Model One
power amplifier, all strung together with Audience AU24 interconnects and speaker cables.
Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words;
ergo, learning is nothing but wind
A lot of no-holds-barred loudspeakers have passed through
my listening room in the last few years, most recently the $23,000/pair Aerial Model 20Ts
-- so you’d think it would be difficult to get too excited over a pair of $1800
speakers. Even I’m surprised, but there you go -- I got a huge kick out of the Ergo
702 DCs.
I’m not saying that the Cantons are competitive with
the Aerials. The Aerials exist on an entirely different plane in terms of detail,
frequency extremes, dynamic range, and inner detail, as they should -- they also exist in
a completely different realm of cost. And I suffered some regret when I disconnected the
Aerials and jockeyed the Cantons into position in my listening room.
But when I began playing music through the Cantons, that
regret quickly dissipated. Because the Ergo 702 DCs were true to the music -- a lot
truer than their modest price tag might lead marque-conscious audiophiles to expect.
Setup was important. The Ergos did not like toe-in -- the
only way I could get proper center fill and depth was to point ’em straight ahead.
Spiking them with the Canton-supplied spikes was essential to getting from them all the
bass weight they were capable of -- if you sit in the farfield, you might want to tilt
them back ever so slightly. And you can get a bit more detail from the Ergos if you biwire
them -- or, at the very least, use a good-quality jumper between the two pairs of binding
posts.
If all this sounds overly finicky to you, then you’re
probably used to run-of-the-mill mid-priced loudspeakers, which seldom benefit as much
from small tweaks as do more ambitious high-end models. But the 702 DCs are
ambitious high-end loudspeakers and should be treated as such.
To start with, they sounded remarkably full-bodied.
They’re rated to 25Hz, but that sounds a tad ambitious to me -- they sure won’t
generate trousers-flapping bass at high SPLs in a big room, but they didn’t rob music
of its foundation, either.
I’d been listening to Prince’s Musicology
[NPG/Columbia 92560] through the Aerials, and Rhonda Smith’s burbling bass lines --
especially on the delicious "Cinnamon Girl" -- had been keeping my fundament in
motion. When I cued up this track to hear it through the Cantons, I expected a huge
letdown.
I was stunned at how much the song remained the same. It
couldn’t play as loud in my big listening room, but it played plenty loud enough --
and the booty-shaking impact and delightful groove came through intact. Rhythm and pace
the Cantons had a-plenty.
They also possessed a huge degree of lush timbral truth.
Cantus’s arrangement of "Shenandoah" on Let Your Voice Be Heard
[Cantus CTS-1201] presented the men’s chorus in a slightly scaled-down version of the
loose arc I’ve become so familiar with from attending their recording sessions. The
solos and supporting choral lines were presented in vivid contrast with the slightly ringy
acoustic of the Carleton College Concert Hall in Northfield, Minnesota. The soundstaging
was holographic, although not life-sized, as it can be with larger (specifically, taller)
speakers.
This diminution in scale was not a crippling shortcoming,
although some listeners may not find it to their taste. The Ergo 702 DC is not a
large speaker, and it didn’t attempt to inflate scale at the cost of precision. I was
impressed by the review pair’s ability to erect a convincingly solid image between
them, intact from the front to the back of the stage. If that solidity came at the cost of
size, it was so impressively real that I couldn’t cavil -- I simply chose to think of
myself as looking down at the musicians from the Family Circle.
I was a little less forgiving of the Ergo’s other
"small" characteristic: a foreshortening of music’s dynamic range. On
large-scale orchestral works, I expect a smallish speaker to tap out before it reaches
roof-raising levels, and the 702 DC was no worse in this regard than, say, the
similarly priced and sized Epos M15. In fact, listening to Classic Records’
scary-good HDAD of Mahler’s Symphony No.8, with Maurice Abravanel conducting the Utah
Symphony [HDAD 2001 DVD/DVD-A], I was actually impressed with how gracefully the Cantons
handled that work’s immense tuttis.
But I did feel a bit scanted with discs recorded at levels
that allowed them unusually broad dynamic ranges, such as the Jerome Harris Quintet’s
Rendezvous [Stereophile STPH013-2]. Engineer John Atkinson mastered this CD
to optimize the sweep from soft to loud -- as a result, we’ve frequently heard
audiophiles complain that they have to "turn it up" to get the levels
they’ve come to expect. But having done that, they complain, the loudest portions of
the disc threaten to launch their woofers across the room! Well, duh -- that’s the
whole point of dynamic range. Most modern discs are mastered to have darned little of it,
cruising along at about 1dB shy of saturation.
Maybe that’s not such a dumb complaint. Some speakers
don’t handle the complete swing from ppp to ffff as well as others, and
act as dynamic limiters. You do have to turn ’em up, and even then, they never
quite hit the full acoustic bloom of the true crescendo. The Ergo 702 DCs fall into
this category -- but then, so does every other sub-$2000 speaker I’ve ever heard, so
there’s no shame in that. (The $2300/pair Thiel CS1.6 is about the least-expensive
speaker I’ve heard that doesn’t exhibit this dynamic damping to some
extent.)
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think I think,
therefore I think I am) -- Wes Phillips
Hats off to Canton. The Ergo 702 DC is a solidly
engineered loudspeaker that is remarkably true to the music. For $1800/pair, it offers a
speaker that is small in scale and huge in aspirations -- and performance.
When I first set up the 702 DCs, my expectations were
modest. I assumed they’d be good, but I wasn’t prepared for just how good
they turned out to be. They aren’t just "good value" -- they’re good
speakers, period.
If you want to own a real high-end loudspeaker system that
isn’t demanding of space, power, or your spare time (set ’em up and forget
’em, I say), these Cantons will satisfy you for many a blissful hour. That’s
what happened at my house -- and now the next speakers I audition will have to measure up
to the Ergo 702 DCs. That prospect should worry most of those high-recognition
loudspeaker manufacturers.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
Canton Ergo 702 DC Loudspeakers
Price: $1800 USD/pair.
Warranty: Five years parts and labor.
Canton Elektronik GmbH & Co. KG
Neugasse 21-23
D-61276 Weilrod
Germany
Phone: (49) (0) 60 83 / 28 70
Fax: (49) (0) 60 83 / 2 81 13
E-mail: info@canton.de
US distributor:
Canton Electronics Corp.
1723 Adams Street NE
Minneapolis, MN 55413
Phone: (612) 706-9250
Fax: (612) 706-9255
E-mail: info@cantonusa.com
Website: www.cantonusa.com
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