Floorstanding loudspeakers — Charney Audio The Lumaca VI

The Lumaca VI is the smallest of three models in the Lumaca series from Charney Audio, the horn loudspeaker maker run by Brian Charney in New Jersey. The maker calls the Lumaca line its highest-performing reference range, developed from its experience with the earlier Concerto. The series comes in three heights, VI, VII and VIII, and the Lumaca VI was presented at Capital Audiofest 2025 with Voxativ AC-2.6 drivers, driven by a Charney 300B stereo amplifier. For scale, the Lumaca VIII at the top of the series stands about 239 cm tall, weighs about 38.6 kg and uses a horn about 368 cm long.

Key specs that matter

The Lumaca VI is rated from 30 Hz to 22 kHz with a sensitivity of 107 dB and a nominal impedance of 8 ohm. Each speaker measures about 190.5 cm high, with a width and depth of about 55.9 cm, and weighs around 25 kg. The tractrix horn inside is about 284 cm long. A pair costs USD 61,000 with Voxativ AC-2.6 drivers and USD 66,000 with AER bd-3b drivers.

Engineering and use context

Instead of a folded box, each Lumaca VI is a wooden cylinder, and the tractrix expansion runs as a continuous curved surface with no corners or flat panels along the path of the wavefront. Charney states that the geometry is held to very tight tolerances. Building such concentric shapes from hardwood and birch plywood is much harder than moulding them from plastic or MDF, so each horn is assembled from many layers of birch plywood cut along thousands of machine tool paths, and development of the Lumaca cabinet took more than two years. The bottom of the Lumaca VI is open, so low frequencies leave the horn in a full 360 degree circle at floor level, whereas the Lumaca VIII uses a 45 degree cutaway facing the rear wall. The design takes a range of 8 inch wideband drivers without a crossover. Both recommended options, the AER and the Voxativ, have twin paper cones and neodymium magnets.

Pairing

With such high sensitivity, the Lumaca VI is meant for low-powered tube amplifiers such as single-ended 300B designs, and Charney also makes its own preamplifier and a modified Audio Note DAC that appeared in the same show system. The maker states that the large horn throat makes a subwoofer unnecessary, which avoids a crossover to a separate bass unit. Its base gives a smaller footprint than those of the larger Lumaca models.

Alternatives

The Charney Audio Lumaca VII has a 320 cm horn in a 213 cm tall cabinet with response extending to 20 Hz.