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Kudos Audio Cardea Super 10A

April 2022

What Hi-Fi Sound and Vision

"There's a good amount of low-end grunt but it's the speakers' ability to paint bass textures that impresses most"

On first acquaintance the Kudos Audio Cardea Super 10A seem like pretty conventional speakers. They are medium-sized, two-way standmounters with a rectangular wooden box and rear-firing reflex port. Nothing special there, right? Except there is, and it's built on a foundation of obsessive engineering and careful sonic tuning rather than ground-breaking tech, flamboyant industrial design or innovative materials.

The Cardea Super 10A tweeter's fabric dome or the paper of its mid/bass driver aren't as attention-grabbing as Beryllium, Kevlar or Diamond, but that doesn't mean the drivers they are part of aren't excellent. Kudos is a relatively small company that buys-in drive units rather than making them in-house, and those used here are some of the best that OEM specialist SEAS can produce, custom made to Kudos's requirements.

That 18cm mid/bass unit is highly developed with a fashionably open but rigid chassis giving a sturdy structure. There is a large 39mm voice coil for good power handling and a great deal of work done on the motor system to maximise heat dissipation and reduce overall distortion levels.

Moving to the higher frequencies, the tweeter is a modified version of the highly regarded 29mm Crescendo K2 fabric dome; the kind of unit more usually seen at far higher price levels. The two drivers are knitted together with a high quality but relatively simple crossover that uses a gentle first-order slope for the mid/bass and a second-order filter for the tweeter.