 Penaudio
Charisma Loudspeakers and Chara Subwoofers
I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was
during London’s HiFi Show & AV Expo 2002 that I walked into a dim room containing
little more than a tiny set of two-way, stand-mounted monitors in front of a fairly
standard-looking subwoofer that wasn’t all that big itself. I can’t remember the
electronics in use or what type of music was playing. What I mostly recall is sitting down
in relief because the room was empty and my dogs were barking.
Then I sat straight up in disbelief with all the hairs on
my forearms (you’ve seen my picture; it had to be the ones on the arms)
standing straight up. The sound was good.
Such a relief after all the audiophile twittering and
honking and booming I’d been hearing all day. It was warm and natural and detailed
and -- well, it was just nice. I’d been hearing details and warmth and
super-duper-tweeters and subwoofers that resembled C-band satellite dishes all day long.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t beat working, but it wears you out.
This was different. It was a lot less like hi-fi and a lot
more like music than anything else I heard that day.
I started talking to the proud designer standing nearby.
"Who distributes these speakers in the US?"
"Nobody -- yet."
"Who distributes them here in the UK?"
"Nobody -- yet. I came here looking for
distributors."
I knew there had to be a catch! One of the standout
products at the show was vaporware -- I’d walked into the room of an audio dreamer
who’d managed to produce a really great product but who wasn’t really in
business. What good is a speaker if nobody can buy it?
I began to talk to the man who came to London with a dream.
He didn’t seem moonstruck at all. He was down to earth, and his footing seemed solid
as he described his goals and his accomplishments. I kept listening to him -- and his
speakers -- and I started to believe he and they just might be the real thing.
I raved about those speakers in my show report, but lost track of that guy and his dream.
One day, not long ago, Portal Audio’s Joe Abrams called me. "I’m thinking
of importing the Penaudio Charisma."
"I think I’ve heard of them," I ventured,
trying to sound convincing.
"I think so, too," Joe said. "Your show
report of them came up in my Google search."
"Oh, those -- I simply have to get my hands on
a pair."
So I did. And the dream lives on!
Dream on
That dreamer’s name is Sami Penttila, and he
established Penaudio in 1999 in Jyväskylä, Finland. Penttila is an amateur musician -- a
pianist, guitarist, and, these days, a bass player. He plays in bands with his drumming
brother. His wife and sisters-in-law also all play acoustic instruments, so music’s
an important part of his life -- and he listens to a lot of it. So he listened to the
speakers available to him at the time and he simply didn’t like most of the
loudspeakers he heard. It was one of those classic I can do better than that
moments.
Penttila may be an amateur musician, but he’s a
professional engineer. That analytical mindset is important when he sets out to design a
product, but he relies on measurements and analytic programs only up to a point. He does
employ 0-, 30-, 60-, and 90-degree free-field measurements, as well as those for phase and
impedance, but once he’s roughed-in his design parameters, he relies most on his ears
and his musical experience.
Penttila says, "I concern myself with tones, depth,
colors, and the space where the instruments are played. These are hard things to measure.
Lately, I have also been recording and mixing songs and learning about the whole audio
chain and how it affects the sound coming through the speakers. I may even produce
a demo album sometime this summer."
I had too much to dream last night
So what hath Penttila wrought?
The Charisma ($2995/pair USD) is a two-way, reflex-loaded
minimonitor with a third-order crossover. The speaker is compact: 5.5" wide by
9" tall by 11" deep. It also sports the most remarkable finish I’ve ever
seen -- it’s striped, making the speaker appear to have been carved out of laminated
furniture-grade plywood. In reality, the Charisma is built of 0.9"-thick MDF; the
striped part -- which is a high-quality, hand-assembled, birch plywood laminate --
is 0.06"-thick veneer. The cabinet uses air, acoustic fiber, and acoustic foam.
"All of them have different densities, which affects the internal damping of the
speaker," Penttila explains.
The drivers are from SEAS, and the Charisma is built around
a custom-tweaked 120mm unit based on a model in SEAS’ Excel range. Penttila had
decided that an internal volume of around 4.6 liters was what he wanted to shoot for, and
he designed the midrange/woofer so that it could extend above 4kHz -- not an arbitrary
number, but one based on the fact that the ear is extremely sensitive to phase and
frequency anomalies below that. He hit his mark: the Charisma crosses over to its tweeter
at 5.5kHz.
The midrange/woofer is assembled on a SEAS’ open-frame
spider and constructed from a specially treated pulped-paper cone that Penttila chose for
its natural timbre. It has a 26mm voice coil, and heavy copper rings above and below the
T-shaped pole-piece -- these, Penttila says, reduce nonlinear and modulation distortion.
The driver sports a solid-copper phase plug, which looks really sharp -- and, oh yeah, is
supposed to serve as a heatsink on the pole-piece, which is "crucial" for high
performance from a small speaker, Penttila claims.
The tweeter is a ferrofluid-cooled 20mm textile-dome driver
chosen for the integration of its output with that of the midrange/woofer. Penttila liked
its dispersion characteristics and smooth, extended range: "It goes up to 26kHz
without resonances."
I called the crossover "third-order" above, which
it is electrically, but add in the drivers’ physical response and it’s
fourth-order. Penttila was punctilious in setting the changeover as high as 5.5kHz because
of research he’d helped conduct at the University of Jyväskylä, in which he
discovered that listeners can more readily hear errors below 1kHz than above that and into
the 3kHz range. As he puts it, "real voices -- humans, wind, thunder, and musical
instruments -- all have their basic note within 100Hz to 2kHz, so that is the area that
people are most perceptive. Higher frequencies are multiples of those tones (harmonics)
and people have no problems recognizing voices if the harmonics are not intact, but it
doesn’t work the other way around -- alter the fundamental and it doesn’t matter
how accurate the overtones are. Besides, phase errors are often easier to hear below 3kHz
than between 3kHz and 20kHz." For the Charisma’s crossover, Penaudio uses Goertz
MI1 cabling and SCR polypropylene capacitors. The speaker has a single pair of WBT binding
posts.
But the Charisma is a small speaker -- it’s
rated to only 80Hz -- so Penttila designed the passive, rear-ported Chara subwoofer
($2500/pair) to complement its strengths and serve as a stand. It’s a side-firing
unit -- Penttila suggests placing the drivers on the outside of the Charas, facing the
walls -- but, of course, you can experiment to see what sounds best to you. In my
listening room, this was indeed the way to go, but that’s a big room and it was ideal
for the Charisma-Chara setup. In my study, which is much smaller, and in which I listen in
the nearfield, I got better results with the drivers on the inside, facing one another.
 The Chara (pronounced kah-ra)
is 26.5" tall and matches the Charisma’s 5.5" by 11" footprint. Each
Chara has two heavy metal outriggers for stability, and four tiny, very pointed cones,
which screw into them. Once planted, the Chara won’t rock or budge.
The Chara also features a tweaked SEAS drive unit -- a
long-throw 176mm cone -- as well as Goertz MI1 cabling and Gradient air-core inductors.
The cabinet is made of 1" MDF and my review pair has a beautiful veneer of blond
Finnish birch, although US importer Joe Abrams has prevailed on Penttila to offer it in
the same laminated-birch finish as the Charisma (the first models are somewhere in transit
as I write this). The Chara’s internal volume is 19 liters. The sub is rated down to
30Hz and crosses over to the Charisma at 180Hz.
The Chara’s speaker connections (two pairs of WBT
terminals) are mounted high on its rear panel. The lower pair takes the input from your
amplifier and the upper set feeds the filtered signal to the Charisma. Penttila placed the
terminals so high in order to keep the connecting jumpers between the two speakers as
short as possible. In the US, those jumpers are made by MIT -- they’re essentially
the tails that terminate the MIT’s Magnum speaker cable, mated to the hefty spade
lugs from the Oracle cable. They aren’t the most flexible jumpers I’ve ever
used, but they certainly supply a fat pipe for the signal transfer.
The Chara’s driver is mounted fairly high on the
cabinet as well. Many manufacturers would place it nearer the floor, to benefit from
boundary reinforcement, but -- and this is only a guess, based on the Chara’s
performance -- Penttila was less interested in slam than in articulation and tone. The
rear-firing port, on the other hand, is located near the bottom of the cabinet.
Into the dream . . .
I listened to the Charisma with and without the Chara in
several rooms and with different systems, including one that mated them with my Musical
Fidelity Nu-Vista preamp and CD player, along with the DarTZeel NHB-108 power amplifier. I
also cobbled together an ambitious office system that used my G5 as a digital source
feeding uncompressed music files to an Apogee Electronics Mini-DAC via its USB output. The
Mini-DAC drove a Linn Klimax Twin. When the Klimax Twin
had to go back to Linn to be upgraded (more to come on that development), I cast about for
something else to drive ’em. My eyes settled on Portal’s Panache integrated
amplifier -- and suddenly I found that I wasn’t missing the Klimax nearly as much as
I had anticipated. Just coincidence that Joe Abrams’ killer integrated made such
beautiful music with the Penaudio speakers? Somehow, I doubt it.
Cables were Shunyata
and Audience -- the Charisma-Chara combo seemed
a great match for the Audiences.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?
The Charisma is a small speaker. That’s great if
you’re looking for a small speaker, but don’t expect a little guy to do a big
guy’s job. If you have a large room, listen at humidity-changing sound pressures, or
thrive on bass slam, the Charisma probably isn’t your mug of oolong.
Those issues didn’t completely disappear when I added
the Chara. Even with the subwoofer, the Charisma was not a fantastic loudspeaker for, say,
my 2400-cubic-foot main listening room. The combo didn’t do badly, but it sounded
lean and, well, a tad "small."
But most people don’t buy small loudspeakers for huge
rooms. (Some do, of course, but they probably aren’t reading www.onhifi.com.)
It’s no surprise that the Charisma-Chara combo hails from Europe, where rooms tend to
be smaller than the big boxes we ’Muricans live in -- well, outside of NYC, my fair
city, that is. In my smaller, office room, which measures 8’ x 15’, the
Charisma-Chara delivered big-speaker performance from a very modest footprint.
On its own, the Charisma has a sensitivity of 85dB/W/m, but
that’s at a nominal 8 ohms (the actual range is 7.9-24 ohms) and represents a fairly
benign load. Penaudio suggests that 30Wpc is sufficient. The Klimax Twin and DarTZeel gave
both the Charismas and the C-C combo some real authority, but you needn’t go that
crazy.
Adding the Chara actually increases the sensitivity to
about 87dB. The Chara is a nominal 4-ohm load, by the way (actual range 3.8-15 ohms).
Counterintuitively, adding the Chara makes the combo easier to drive than the
Charisma alone.
Now comes the praise. As I first discovered in London, the
Charismas are magic. If you listen to them on their own, they’ll lack a small
amount of bloom in the bottom, because they start rolling off at around 80Hz. In a small
room, you’ll still get usable bass information down toward 60Hz, but that’s
still shy of reproducing the bottom notes of a bass guitar, for instance, or the lovely
acoustic of the Peggy and Yale Gordon Center for the Performing Arts on David
Russell’s Plays Bach [Telarc CD-80584].
But what the Charisma did honor fully was the sound of Russell’s lovely,
organic guitar tone -- and it skipped from note to note with an agility that put many
larger speakers to shame.
The Charisma did the same thing with full-scale works, such
as Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish National Orchestra’s traversal of the
Brahms symphonies [Telarc CD-80450], capturing Brahms’ lush inner voices and the epic
sweep of his melodic momentum.
Did the Charismas give me that U-R-There sensation with the
symphonies? No, they missed that by the slightest smidge -- but they were clear and
articulate, and they got me very close to being there. Nor am I sure that most larger
speakers could have done better in a small room -- pouring a gallon into a quart jar
doesn’t give you more milk, just a sloppier jar. More important, the Charisma added
to the signal no grunge, no puddingy-slow bass, no shrillness.
The Charisma was neither too sweet nor too crisp -- it had
bite, but it was really easy to take. It had detail, but didn’t partake of that
laser-etched, too-much-information assault that some audiophiles confuse with accuracy.
Sweet dreams are made of this
When I added the Chara subwoofer, things filled out pretty
nicely. The combo still won’t satisfy you if dance music at high SPLs is your thing,
but they did replace that missing bottom octave of the bass guitar with convincing impact.
However, adding the Chara did a lot more than deepen the
Charisma’s bass response -- as is so frequently the case when adding a high-quality
subwoofer, what the Chara actually did was to improve the Charisma’s midrange.
That’s probably because it relieves the midrange/woofer of its most difficult duties,
freeing it to do what it does best. But it can’t be denied that that extra octave
also removes the Charisma’s slight leanness.
That combination of relaxed midrange detail and additional
warmth probably is worth the extra $2500 for the Charas, with the deeper bass just
icing on the cake. Easy for me to say, of course -- you’ll have to decide for
yourself. All I know is that, after I added the Chara to the system, I stopped obsessing
over anything I might be missing and began fixating on what I wanted to hear next.
Piano was a particular pleasure. I marveled yet again at
Hyperion Knight’s nimble finger sprints on Rhapsody [CD, Stereophile
STPH010-2] and at the depths of Alfred Brendel’s understanding of -- well, just about
everything. I also waded in the vast ocean of Robert Silverman’s cycle of
Beethoven’s piano sonatas [CD, OrpheumMasters KSP 830]. What was so appealing about
the Charisma-Chara’s piano sound was its stability. Notes rang distinctly, yet the tone
was there. Knight had a bright, distinct signature that was quite different from the
rounded -- dare I say cerebral? -- tone of Brendel, although they both were clearly
playing concert Steinways; the similarities were there, too. Silverman’s Beethoven
was played on a Bösendorfer Reproducing Piano, and that sound, too, was accordingly
different. Ahhh, but the music was uniformly glorious.
And as long as I’ve had the Charisma-Charas set up,
the music has never stopped.
When I stop dreaming, that’s when I’ll stop
loving you
I don’t want to minimize the Penaudio system’s
competition. You can buy compact floorstanding monitors for much less than $5500 that can
rival one or even several of the individual aspects of the Charisma-Chara’s sound.
You can buy speakers that have more bottom-end impact. But that’s part of the
equation of personal taste. It’s your money and it’s your choice.
But I think the Penaudio Charisma-Chara system has a very
strong list of attributes. The sound quality is certainly high-end -- competitive with
speakers that cost far more and take up a lot more space. The Penaudios have the
detail, timbre, and imaging that I require from a hi-fi system. Did I neglect to mention
the imaging? Well, they’re a precision minimonitor -- you do the math.
And the sound is the real thing -- not that you’ll
focus as much on the sound as you will on the music. These loudspeakers had to have
been designed by a musician -- they don’t confuse the map with the territory the way
so many "audiophile" loudspeakers do. If your musical tastes are anything like
mine, you’ll want to coo sweet nothings in their reflex ports and run your hands
suggestively over their fine veneer. Hmmm. Maybe the right word isn’t love but
lust.
The Charisma-Chara is designed for the forgotten audiophile
who doesn’t live in a loft apartment. There’s nothing wrong with that -- I wish I
lived in a loft -- but most of us don’t get to live in dream houses. For all of us
music lovers who don’t, the Penaudio Charisma-Chara is a dream come true.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
Penaudio Charisma
Loudspeakers and Chara Subwoofers
Price: Charisma, $2995/pair USD; Chara, $2500/pair USD.
Warranty: Three years parts and labor.
Penaudio Ltd.
Mesikämmen 16
40400 Jyväskylä
Finland
Phone: (358) 14-618012
E-mail: info@penaudio.fi
Website: www.penaudio.fi
North American distributor:
Portal Audio, Inc.
6626 Charter Hills Road
Charlotte, NC 28277
Phone: (888) 737-4434
Fax: (704) 543-0207
E-mail: joe@portalaudio.com
Website: www.portalaudio.com
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