The Fifth Element #77


A new loudspeaker or an updated classic?














Given all that, why would I consider the Canalis Anima to be a "new" loudspeaker? I view the Canalis Anima the way I view Harbeth's P3ESR, vis-à-vis the BBC LS3/5a from which it descends. In both cases, the footprints are the same, and the cabinets can function as drop-in replacements (Harbeth's P3ESR can drop into the soffit space left by a defunct LS3/5a). However, design changes in each case have resulted in performance that I believe constitutes a clean break with the predecessor's. In the case of the P3ESR, the cabinet remains the same, but the drivers and crossover changed. With Canalis's Anima, the cabinet material (but not its size or shape) changed radically, while the drivers remained the same (though there are revisions to the crossover). In both cases, I think, evolution turned the corner into revolution.

What is revolutionary about the Canalis Anima? In a word, bamboo. Allen Perkins told me that he'd begun thinking about and experimenting with bamboo plywood as a speaker-cabinet material 10 or so years ago, and that he still has stain and finish experiments from that time. The plywood of Canalis's speaker enclosures and the Anima's stand is ¾" thick, and distinguished by the fact that its core consists of substantial, vertically oriented fillets of bamboo rather than the usual multiple thin horizontal layers of hardwood, as in the Baltic-birch plywood often found in high-quality speaker enclosures. In most Shahinian speakers, for example, the enclosure's edges are beveled to reveal the layers of plies (and to make it clear that the cabinet is not made of MDF). The surface layers of Canalis's bamboo plywood are laminated of thinner fillets, oriented cross-grain to the core.

Why bamboo plywood? The short answer is: rigidity, plus self-damping. In this regard, it's important that Canalis chose bamboo plywood for acoustical performance reasons, which is different from choosing a bamboo veneer for aesthetic or ecological reasons. After a few weeks of living with Canalis's Anima, I found myself thinking of bamboo plywood as the poor man's carbon fiber. Indeed, the Anima's sonic coherence called to mind fond memories of various incarnations of Wilson Benesch's ACT loudspeakers. Gerhard bases his work on mathematical models by Don Keele, specifically the QB3 alignment, an overdamped woofer alignment that Gerhard claims behaves more like a sealed box, because of its longer port. Gerhard also believes that it's better to concentrate on getting the overtones of bass notes right and let the ear/brain system fill in the missing fundamental, than to make the trade-offs involved in including a large woofer in a two-way design. He chose the crossover frequency of 1900Hz to stay away from the range where the output of his 5" woofer becomes directional.