CNO build by Andrej
October 2008

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Here is my review of the speakers....you can delete my previous comments and add this one to photos....

After almost one year of occasional work, I finally managed to put all loudspeaker ingredients together. My CNO loudspeaker version is tilted back 5 degrees . The cabinet is made from 22 / 28 mm MDF and all the walls are damped with 4 mm bitumen pads and recycled foam. The cabinet is quite heavy, but it is dead silent. Crossover consist of Mundorf baked air coils and Mcap capacitors.

Before I started with CNO project I buy drivers for TJL2 project. Seas magnesium midbass speaker sounds very clean with absolute lack of audible distortion and have a great bass. But it has very low sensitivity and compared to Nextel unit, it lacks the drive, punch and life. For my taste, magnesium driver sound too clean for it`s own good. With W18NX speaker music flows simply naturally and thanks to bigger magnet you will say goodbye to some deep bass, but you will gain in dynamics and headroom.

My CNO loudspeaker sounds simply astonished. It is not the speaker which will impress your friends with subsonic bass. For listening it, you have to take some time, slightly dim the lights, feed it with appropriate software and then you can simply enjoy. The integration between tweeter and midbass is simply superb. Midrange is beautifully open and transparent and never sound harsh, even with not so good recordings. The tweeter is absolutely phenomenal. Forget about SS8513 sibilants here. I would say it could compare with magnetostatic tweters with ease. Bass not enter subsonic dimensions, but it has a "snap" and can produce a loud "thump" instead of "whomp" when required. Soundstage is very good and loudspeakers really disappeared when they are feed with some nice music. Interesting...I also tried notch filter, but it simply kills the life and transparency of the speakers.

I think this speaker is really worth every cent and compared to popular Proac 2.5 speakers, it is several steps higher or nearer to the hifi heaven:))))))
Andrej


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