Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

The Canalis Anima is very similar to the earlier Sonics by Joachim Gerhard Anima (favorably reviewed by Wes Phillips in July 2007), replacing that speaker's marine-grade plywood cabinet with one made of bamboo plywood. With the speakers placed on their matching stands, which place the listener's ears level with the top of the woofers rather than slightly above the tweeters, John Marks wrote that "the Animas struck a wonderful tonal balance that had only a slight emphasis of the treble."

I examined the performance of the Anima with DRA Labs' MLSSA system, using a calibrated DPA 4006 microphone to measure the speaker's frequency response in the farfield, and an Earthworks QTC-40 mike for the nearfield responses. My measurements of the earlier Sonics version can be found here.

I estimated the Anima's voltage sensitivity as 86.1dB(B)/2.83V/m, confirming the specified 86dB. Its plot of impedance magnitude and phase against frequency (fig.1) is very similar to that of the 2007 Anima, but with a slightly higher minimum impedance in the mid-treble and a greater increase in impedance in the crossover region. The Anima will be relatively easy for the partnering amplifier to drive.

Tested with a simple plastic-tape accelerometer, the Anima's enclosure was, as JM described, quite nonresonant. The only mode of significance I could find lay at a high 477Hz (fig.2) and was well suppressed.

The rear port is tuned to the same 60Hz as the earlier speaker, and the woofer has the expected minimum-motion notch in its output at that frequency (fig.3, blue trace). The port's output (red trace) peaks in the midbass in textbook manner, though, again like the 2007 Anima, there is a peak evident in its response in the upper midband. This coincides with a small peak in the new Anima's farfield response (black trace). Despite the claim for baffle-step compensation, the woofer's output gently slopes up before crossing over to the tweeter. The tweeter is balanced a couple of dB higher than the woofer, which correlates with JM's finding the speaker to sound a touch bright, although the balance on the tweeter axis is respectably uniform overall.

In the horizontal plane, the Canalis Anima offers a more uniform dispersion (fig.4) than the Sonics Anima, though the ¾" tweeter still becomes more directional above 8kHz than I was expecting. JM found the Anima's treble to sound emphasized when he listened above the tweeter axis. (The older speaker sounded sucked-out in the crossover region when listened to this way.) However, the Anima's vertical-dispersion plot, normalized to the tweeter-axis response (fig.5), suggests that its balance doesn't change significantly over quite a wide –5°, +15° angle, other than the top octaves dropping a little below the tweeter axis.

The older speaker's tweeter was wired in inverted acoustic polarity, its woofer in positive polarity. By contrast, the new version's step response (fig.6) reveals that both drive-units are connected in positive acoustic polarity; in conjunction with the sloped-back baffle, the smooth blend of the decay of the tweeter's step with the start of the woofer's step implies optimal crossover design. The cumulative spectral-decay plot on the tweeter axis (fig.7) is very much cleaner than the older Anima's.

Overall, its measured performance indicates that the Canalis update of the Sonics Anima has improved on the latter's already excellent sound quality. However, that slightly hot tweeter will make it a better match for mellow electronics, I feel.—John Atkinson