This is a review written by Terry Ellis April 2025.

For my video review please see my YouTube channel link here

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When new is good

I think the first time you experience a new brand of HiFi speakers it can tell you quite a lot about that brands sonic identity. I think that is especially true for larger companies that manufacturer a big range of products and this is where the term “house sound” comes from. This has been my first time listening to some German made Canton speakers and if you are new to them as well what can I tell you about Canton’s sonic identity, quite a lot.

Canton are Germany’s largest speaker manufacturer and that makes them an equivalent to maybe KEF or Bowers here in the UK. Like KEF and Bowers, Canton manufacture a big selection of speakers across a very wide price range. I have been reviewing their Reference 2 speakers, with the Reference being Canton’s flagship line of the speakers and number 2 being the second from the top of the Reference line. In terms of getting a good understanding of Canton’s sonic identity reviewing a reference speaker was the perfect choice.

Great Looks but hidden gem

I know a lot of you already really like the look of these speakers based on how many likes one of my Instagram posts got and I am in agreement with you. The Reference 2 is a very nice looking speaker that blends a mixture of modern and contemporary into one, I think aided by this pairs walnut wood finish instead of black or white, the other two available finishes.

At first when you look at the Reference 2 it looks like a pretty familiar three way bass reflex speaker with maybe the most interesting thing being the tweeter positioned below the mid range driver. However once you get up close and start to inspect the speakers you appreciate a number of attentions to detail that you could very easily miss.  Starting with what is most obvious, the shape of the cabinet, its very curvaceous from every angle that you look at it from. The cabinet is made from multiple layers of wood that are curved to create the shape and the front baffle really stands out for being fully curved also, this is something we very seldom see. The sides of the speaker are very obviously curved and its with the side profile that you can see the top of the speaker curves downwards quite an amount too. Something you could easily miss, the curve is mirrored at the bottom of the speakers cabinet so visually the form is symmetrical and I appreciate that attention to detail.
The back of cabinet is curved but its more subtle and I also appreciated the quality of the finish where clearly wood veneers are joined seamlessly, even on this curved cabinet. This must be very hard to do this well where the woods natural grain pattern flows seamlessly, you can call me very impressed by that.

Looking closer and something that is again not obvious, when you look at the baffle from the side profile, the curved front baffle and how the drivers are installed seem to give the drivers a natural time alignment where the tweeter sits forward slightly in relation to the mid range and bass drivers, being recessed back into the cabinet some. This effect might be an optical illusion to some degree but either way how the drivers are set into the cabinet is very interesting.

The driver array features a one inch BC, black aluminium oxide ceramic tweeter and I did my best to get it on camera for you but its hidden away behind a grill and hard to see. There is something in front of the tweeter that I assume acts in tandem with the very obvious wave guide surround to control dispersion.

For the mid range the Reference 2 uses a seven inch BCT driver, BCT is black ceramic tungsten and I was very curious about this driver, how its made and why this mix of materials? I was told BCT is where aluminium goes through a chemical process that converts 25% of its molecular structure into a ceramic molecular structure with tungsten, and some other metal elements being added to balance the ratios. This makes the driver cone very stiff and yet still very light and dampened with a black appearance and its Cantons “perfect” driver material. This is all done in house as Canton make all their own drivers and that is very cool.

Bass built differently 

The dual eight and a half inch bass drivers are also BCT drivers so there is almost the same material being used for all the drivers and in the past I have found that helps to make a speaker sound more coherent top to bottom. Then another detail you could easily miss is the surrounds of the drivers and their shape, that is narrow at the sides and very deep at the top and bottom. Maybe that seems a given with the curved shape of the speaker but they are made from a specific thermoplastic material, a POM that Canton say is used for its stiffness and damping properties.

While we are on the bass drivers looking at the bottom of the speaker you see what looks like a space so its easy to assume this is a down firing speaker, but its not at least in a traditional sense. Canton say the Reference 2 is a front and rear firing speaker for its bass where the ratio between the two has been perfectly optimised to make the speaker more flexible for its placement in the room. If this is true and based on my experience I have no reason to doubt them, this could be a huge advantage for many people to achieving better bass.

Something else that is not obvious at all is Canton do not use spikes, instead they have created their own speaker isolation feet. I loved this aspect about them because it meant I could very easily move these 62Kg each, heavy speakers around my room for all the video work but more useful was when I was setting them up I could easily nudge them just very small amounts to get them positioned perfect. You cannot do this very easily with very heavy speakers sat on spikes.

Lastly to speak about is the rear of the speaker where Canton are using WBT speaker cable terminals and I this appreciate that as they are very good quality. However more interesting is what Canton call room compensation. Its possible to change the frequency behaviour of the speaker by + or – 1.5db in the lower mid range and the treble region meaning the Reference 2 can sound more full in the upper bass / lower mids or quite the opposite leaner there for a more open sound. You can spice up the treble for a sharper crisper faster sound or darken it down for a calmer warmer presentation. Of course you can do any combination between the mids and highs adjustment. This works by routing the signal through different values on the crossover and it makes the speaker infinitely more flexible not only for the room but also the system you use with them and I go into this more shortly, but let me say now do not underestimate the value of this, it’s massive I can promise you.

Speaking of the crossover I have some images of them, plural, but we do not have any scale and I always appreciate holding a crossover in my hands to feel the weight, a sign of the amount of copper cabling used. Canton say their crossovers use MKP and MKT capacitors for the high frequencies, the boards have double the conductor cross sections with thicker pcb’s and thick fully tinned conductor surfaces. They are microphony decoupled inside the cabinet too and the contacts are all gold plated copper with “high end” internal wire.

Large speaker, price to match

The Reference 2 clearly have some very impressive attentions to detail but there is one thing I really didn’t like about them and that is the grills. Canton have employed an individual grill per speaker driver, so four per speaker and I just really don’t like that approach as its a pain to remove and store them. I just want one grill on a speaker and I feel so strongly about this I didn’t even take them out of the box.

Time for the price, the Reference 2 cost £17000 for the pair or £18000 in this walnut premium finish and that is a huge amount of money for any HiFi speakers. The price puts the Canton in direct competition with speakers like KEF’s Reference 5 Meta which cost about the same so its not a crazy price being asked for them. This is especially true when another “like for like”speaker could be the Bowers 802 D4 and they cost around £10,000 more, so there is that. For most of us we would have to save our pennies for a very long time to buy these speakers with them being very much an end game speaker purchase and that only leaves one question, would it be worth it?

Big speaker work in a small room?

There has been two things here for me to consider, one is the sound quality of the Reference 2 as a speaker, but the second thing is they are a large speaker for my size of room. My room is 3.5 x 5 metres approximately so it is a small room but it’s not an average room because it’s extensively acoustically treated, especially for bass. It’s been impossible for me to separate these two things as this has been my time ever listening to a Canton speaker and maybe some of what I will say about the sound is as a result of both of these things, please do bear that in mind.

In terms of setup thinking they might be too big for this room from a bass output point of view I was fully expecting to need to work around this with their placement and maybe use some DSP, but that was not the case at all. I ended up positioning them in the exact same spot in the room as always, the perfect spot in this room for the best balance of bass response with as much sound stage as I can get, so they have ended up being the perfect sized speaker for this room and my taste, that is likely a result of how well the port system works for them being more room setup flexible, so that is super interesting.

If you have followed me for a while you will have seen me review more larger speakers recently and that is not because I enjoy moving these massively heavy boxes around, its because I generally prefer the sound of large speakers compared to smaller ones. Smaller speakers can sound just as big in my small room as larger speakers but a larger speaker like the Reference 2 do scale more easily and more effortlessly. That was the first thing that stood out to me about the Canton’s sound, it was not just the size and scale of all music but its solidity, everything in the sound stage, for all music, was very apparently solid sounding. I really liked this about them because its adds a sense authentic palpability to all music and I think it’s just more fun to listen to music sounding like that.

The second thing that stood out to me about them was their dispersion. I could easily hear where the Canton’s sound dispersion is super smooth and even with nothing audible standing out at any specific frequency region. They sound crazy smooth and I could test this easily by moving my head around and listening to how their sound changed and it hardly changed at all, so if you listen on different seats on a coach or if you and another both sit and listen together the Canton might be a great speaker to consider as you will both get a very similar great listening experience. Not all speakers are like that as we know.

Smoother than Sade Operators

There are some pro’s and cons to this overriding smoothness but these are some of the smoothest sounding speakers I have listened to so far. It starts from their bass and goes all the way up to the treble, all with exactly the same amount of relative smoothness for that frequency band and that has been very stand out about them. I assume this is all interlinked with the benefits of the very curved cabinet, all the waveguides and driver quality and general design. I have not been able to get any real, what I would call harsh notes out of them, even with a fairly bright setup, you can hear the system is bright but it still sounds smooth in being bright.

That is in quite stark contrast to a speaker like the Audio Solutions Figaro M2 which is also a smooth sounding speaker in the main, but their design is more obviously lively in the mids and highs. This stands out when you compare them and the Figaro will show you a HiFi system treble overzealousness in a way that stands out more as a negative than the Canton do. So the Reference 2, to me is intended to be more of a people pleaser speaker and that means they do play it a little safe in some regards. At first I missed the little more excitement I am used to from the Figaro, again in the mids and highs and found the Canton’s 3D sound stage imaging to be not as clear or as specific, music felt less spacious specific and more on mass.

That was another thing that has stood out to me about the Reference 2, their consistency of their overall sound delivery and that smoothness. Their sound stage imaging is very consistent and very smooth so the overall sound stage they produce is excellent for sounding holographic 3D but because the music sounds so smooth the backing layers of the sound stage don’t sound quite so clearly present, again compared to Figaro that give the backing layers of music more clarity and they seem to pop a little more. So sound specificity is maybe not the Canton’s big strength and I missed that at first so I changed the room compensation for the treble to be in the + setting. That closed the gap by adding more treble clarity, energy and speed so the specificity to music increased and I was impressed by how useful that adjustment was and how much difference it made in that regard. The kind of difference between like and love the sound, not quite fully happy to very happy.

These differences aside the Reference 2 is still my kind of speaker, they are big and full and smooth in their bass delivery so always deliver a pleasing, nice flowing bass that was never mechanical sounding. There was plenty of bass at lower volumes too which I don’t get from the smaller Figaro speakers, they need turning up more by comparison and that’s another difference or benefit of the larger speakers maybe. The Canton can sound big, full and solid and they have great impact for their bass delivery with heavy hitting music but also fast and nimble bass for fingers on strings if the amplifier is up the task of being fast enough to drive them to deliver that. I found it was possible for them to sound a little thick in the bass with the wrong amplifier but of course you could adjust this some with mid range – setting of the room compensation that would lean the speakers sound a little and open them up. I didn’t use this option but you could.

The Reference 2 can sound very fast in their bass but to me they go big first and fast second and I prefer it that way around because I find it easier to get an overall sound balance in my room that works for me. That speaker design also works great with my current best power amplifier the Esoteric S03, a power amp that does an amazing job of creating space in the sound stage by having a vice like tight grip of the speakers, so a massive amount of control. The downside of this is the bass gets a little leaner and I notice this mostly in the mid bass region in my room and how that effects vocals fullness. Again I could use the room compensation to + this range adding a touch more mid bass fullness which was perfect for the Esoteric amplifier.

Being able to tweak the sound of the speaker without needing to move it I have found to be fantastically useful but I do wish there was an another option for the treble to be adjusted half of what it does now, that would be perfect. Sometimes I wanted a little more from the treble but not as much as the + adjustment changed. However lets be real here for a minute, most speakers don’t give us any adjustment like this so lets not look an extremely useful gift horse in the mouth.

System’s synergy?

For the rest of the sound from the Reference 2 it was system dependent. I had a crazy high end system here for this review, very much on purpose with the fantastic Vinnie Rossi BRAMA preamplifier in the system. With this amazing pre the vocals sounded just fantastic, clear and palpable, reach out and touch them with such a nice organic character for both male and female across all styles of music. With this system I was deep into music listening for about 8 hours for three consecutive days, the system had me locked in and only great speakers can do that to me these days. With this system the speakers treble was fantastic too for being clear, detailed and fast with stunning trails and decays so more subtle details, but overall there was just a nice mixture of treble spice and sugar, very pleasing highs but with an authenticity about them. Don’t forget smooth, always smooth.

Later I used several more “real world priced” systems using the Eversolo A10 as a streaming DAC and Preamp and three different powers amplifiers costing £3k and below. I still got some great results showing the flexibility of the Canton speakers and how they are not too demanding to drive. One of the amplifiers was the Galion TSA75 and this pairing sounded particularly good for the less than 1500 dollars the amplifier costs. I don’t think you would want to go any lower than this in terms of quality but you could start here with these speakers be happy and improve your system over time and the speakers will keep giving. I tested that as well using two Eversolo F10 power amplifiers as monoblock’s compared to one in stereo, both still reasonably priced compared to the speakers. Neither delivered music at the quality of the big system but both sounded bloody good overall, very full, warm and rich, clean and very dynamic, listen all day stuff. This again showed the speakers flexibility and their smoothness helps make them less fussy I feel.

Final Thoughts

Time to wrap up this very long review with a heartfelt I am going to miss these Canton speakers a lot. They have been nothing like what I expected and so much better for me and my taste than I expected and that is great.  I think you can tell there has been a lot of engineering love go into these speakers with the outcome being its a high end speaker that has a heart. It’s not an analytical tool as many high end speakers can become and that makes them a lot easier to get a great result from. Yes they are not as clear specific sounding as some others, they play it a bit safe instead prioritising smoothness but once I was past that I have had a blast with them as they are extremely enjoyable speakers to always listen to with the potential to be much more than that with a great system.

I have had no desire to want to pack them up, they are one of favourite speakers so far.

A Special Performer Award is Pursuit Perfect Systems highest accolade and is in recognition of exceptional product performance regardless of price

For the full specification of the Canton Reference 2 see their website linked here