Напольная акустика — Canton Smart Townus 8

The Smart Townus 8 is a fully active wireless three-way floorstanding speaker from Canton, part of the Townus series that the German maker named after the Taunus hills in Hesse where it has its headquarters. Canton aimed the series at design-minded city dwellers, and the Smart versions add built-in amplification and wireless links to the passive Townus cabinets. The pair costs EUR 3,500 in Germany and comes in black high gloss, walnut or white semi-gloss.

Key specs that matter

Canton's German technical data lists two 160 mm woofers with titanium double cones, a 160 mm titanium midrange and a 25 mm ceramic tweeter behind a transmission front plate, while the North American pages give the driver size as 154 mm. A Class D amplifier provides 350 W per speaker, with each driver fed by its own amplifier channel. The quoted range is 24 Hz to 30,000 Hz. Inputs are one RCA analogue, one balanced XLR at 2 V, a USB 2.0 port with an XMOS receiver, and coaxial and optical S/PDIF, all handling PCM up to 24 bit and 96 kHz, plus Bluetooth 3.0 with aptX and SBC. There is a mono RCA subwoofer output. Each cabinet measures 23 x 101.5 x 33 cm and weighs 21 kg, and standby draw is 0.5 W in ECO mode or 1.5 W by default.

Engineering and use context

The bass reflex cabinet is braced inside and lined with damping material placed at chosen points. Canton uses its wave surrounds on the cones and screwless diamond-cut aluminium rings that also stiffen the driver mounting. The two speakers talk over Canton's own 5 GHz wireless network, carrying 24 bit and 96 kHz in stereo and 16 bit and 48 kHz in surround setups. Built-in decoding handles Dolby Audio and DTS Digital Surround, while the menu offers bass management, an equaliser, a speech mode, dynamic range control, lip-sync delay, a sleep timer and stored presets per source. A display and a supplied remote control handle input selection, and the speaker can learn codes from a TV remote. Supplied accessories are a power cord and 1.5 m optical, coaxial and analogue cables.

Pairing

No external amplifier or speaker cable is needed, so a TV, CD transport, turntable with phono stage or network player connects straight to the inputs. For streaming with Spotify Connect, Chromecast and AirPlay 2, Canton offers the Smart Connect 5.1 S2 hub, and further Smart models such as the Smart Soundbox 3 S2 or the compact Smart Townus 2 can extend the pair to a 5.1 system with a subwoofer on the sub output.

Alternatives

The Canton Smart Vento 9 S2 is a larger powered wireless floorstander using 192 mm titanium graphite woofers and 600 W per speaker.