Kudos Audio Cardea Super 10A

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

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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.

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