Напольная акустика — Cinnamon Audio Cassia

The Cassia is the first loudspeaker from Cinnamon Audio, a young Portuguese company run by the brothers Ricardo and Diogo Canelas, with Ricardo holding a PhD in engineering, high-performance computing and fluid mechanics. Cinnamon calls it the inception of the brand and its reference model. Each system is hand built to order, lead times begin at three months for standard finishes, and the price is USD 54,995 per pair.

Key specs that matter

This is a floorstanding open-baffle design with no enclosure. An 8 inch mid coupler driver and a horn-loaded AMT tweeter handle the upper range, and two 15 inch woofers work below 150 Hz. Cinnamon quotes a response of 25 Hz to 30 kHz within 3 dB, a sensitivity of about 97 dB for 1 W at 1 m and a nominal impedance of 10 ohm. The bass section runs from a built-in 250 W amplifier with DSP. Each speaker stands 145 cm tall, 41 cm wide and 60 cm deep and weighs 75 kg.

Engineering and use context

Cinnamon builds the Cassia on three ideas - pure dipole radiation, controlled and matched directivity across the drivers, and adjustable correction of the lowest frequencies. The mid coupler and the AMT are joined by a phase-aligned, low-order passive crossover whose parts were individually selected and matched, and it sits in an external crossover box. The woofers are re-amplified - the speaker takes one ordinary speaker cable feed, and its internal amplifier with DSP drives the woofers with frequency and time correction. The drivers are made in Europe with low-tolerance voice coils. Baffles are offered in hand-oiled birch or around 50 exotic veneers, other parts can be painted in RAL colours in gloss, matte or metallic, and hand-brushed aluminium parts get a hand-applied wax finish. The price covers the speakers, the crossover box, power and signal cables and installation by the maker.

Pairing

Because the internal amplifier carries the bass load, the external amplifier only drives the passive mid and high section, which presents an easy nominal load. Cinnamon states that a 5 W single-ended triode amplifier can control the Cassia across the full range, so low-power valve designs suit it, as do solid-state amplifiers. As open dipoles, the speakers send energy backward with the same strength as forward, so they need clear space behind the baffle.

Alternatives

The Cinnamon Ellipticum is the smaller floorstander derived from the Cassia, using a single 12 inch woofer in a 105 cm tall cabinet that weighs 45 kg.