If, like Chario, you are a small, boutique hi-fi manufacturer that wants to save money on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the products you’re making, one way to do this is by cutting down on your photography costs, because professional photo shoots are expensive.
And one way to do this is to build products that look identical, so you can get a professional photographer to shoot one model, then use the same photographs for all your other models.
Now I am not saying that this is the reason that Chario’s Constellation II Lynx looks identical to the Chario Constellation II Delphinus, but there’s no doubt that – in photographs at least – the two appear to be absolutely identical.
However, just as the mother of identical twins can tell them apart, Chario’s designer could easily point out the differences to you, and if you see them side-by-side in the flesh, so to speak, you wouldn’t have any difficulty telling them apart either.
I said the Constellation MkII Lynx’s tweeter was ‘oddly large’ because in a world where the 25mm diameter dome tweeter reigns supreme (though of course, there are exceptions), the Lynx’s soft-dome tweeter is 38mm in diameter.
The larger diameter of the tweeter on the one hand increases mass, which drags down the high-frequency extension, but on the other hand means that the voice-coil diameter is larger, so there’s more wire in the gap, and thus potentially higher efficiency and higher power-handling, so there’s a bit of swings and roundabouts in play here.
In the MkII Lynx’s tweeter, the dome is at the centre of a very large (130mm diameter) face-plate that seems to act as a horn as well as a face-plate, which would further improve the efficiency of the tweeter while at the same time also improving dispersion. The tweeter’s face-plate is secured to the baffle by star-headed wood screws, rather than by bolt/nut fixings, and is recessed into it to avoid deleterious edge effects.
Finally, in a world where neodymium is becoming the preferred magnetic material for drivers, the MkII Lynx has a conventional ferrite magnet, albeit one that’s very large and very heavy.
The crossover point between the tweeter and the bass/midrange driver is at 1.5kHz, a frequency that’s the same as the Delphinus. In this case, because the MkII Lynx has a smaller driver, it theoretically is more easily able to get up to this frequency, albeit at the cost of losing some extension in the low frequencies because of the reduced cone excursion and smaller cone area.
The chassis of the Mk II Lynx’s bass/midrange driver chassis is not actually round, which makes any single-figure measurement of it rather misleading. It would seem that the 130mm dimension quoted by Chario is the distance between the screw mounting holes on the chassis, which is a pretty common method of stating driver diameter. However, if you want to hang some more revealing figures on the size of the bass/midrange driver, it’s 135mm across horizontally and 152mm from corner edge to corner edge.
The moving part of the driver has a diameter of 115mm (including the roll surround) and the cone itself is 95mm in diameter. However the important dimension for any driver is the effective cone area (Sd) that derives from what’s called the Thiele/Small diameter, which is the distance from half-way across the roll surround on one side to half-way across the surround on the opposite side, and this is 100mm, which gives an effective cone area (Sd) of 79cm².
The cone is made from a paper compound, while the cone suspension, which has a normal ‘traditional’ roll surround, is made from a rubber compound. The central dust-cap is dished, rather than domed, which gives a much cleaner ‘look’.
Most small loudspeaker manufacturers do not build their own drivers, and even those that do supposedly ‘build our own drivers’ actually do so by assembling parts they have purchased from other manufacturers – cones from one supplier, surrounds from another, chassis from another, magnets from someone else, and so on. Chario says it is different, and claims on its website: “Chario is in the very small world of handcrafting companies that totally make their loudspeakers, drivers and cabinet, to meet 100% of the project parameters.”
The Italian translation means you could read this sentence two ways, and Chario says its operations are fragmented right across Italy, with its headquarters located in Vimercate, near Milan, a small factory in another town close to Vimercate, and a larger factory where all the cabinetry is built that’s near Vicenza. The company says that both the bass/midrange drivers and the tweeters are made “in a factory near Ancona, on Italy’s eastern coast.”
The MkII Lynx is a bass-reflex design, where the designer uses the output from the rear of the cone to deliver additional bass, but whereas most designers put the port on the front or rear of the cabinet, Chario’s designer has put the Lynx’s port on the bottom of the cabinet, firing downwards.
This, of course, means that the cabinet must be elevated above whatever surface it’s placed on, in order for the sound to be delivered efficiently into the room. On the MkII Lynx this is achieved by using either rubber feet or steel spikes (your choice, because both are provided). It also means that the bass response will be quite different if you use the speakers on, say, a shelf, rather than a stand, because the increased surface area of a shelf underneath the speaker will reinforce the bass more than the limited surface area at the top of a speaker stand.
As for the port itself, the one on the MkII Lynx is 185mm in length and 55mm in diameter, with neither its entry nor its exit flared. What is on the rear baffle is a single pair of gold-plated multi-way speaker connectors that accept banana plugs, spades, ring connectors and bare wire. Personally, if I had designed these speakers, I would have put the connectors underneath the cabinet, where they’d be completely out of sight.
The Lynx’s cabinetry is a lesson in luxury and when you’ve seen and touched those beautiful side panels you won’t be surprised to learn that they’re not made of MDF covered by veneer, but from solid blocks of wood hewn from trees grown in Italy. Again, quoting from Chario’s website: “In a Chario everything speaks Italian, from the massive wood used for the cabinet construction, strictly of Italian origin, to the drivers, designed and made in Italy.”
I did wonder why, given this emphasis on its Italian heritage, the company name itself doesn’t sound very Italian, and indeed Google Translate (my authority on these matters) refused to recognise it as an Italian name at all, instead suggesting that it might be Welsh! It turns out that the company’s founders, Carlo Vicenzetto and Mario Marcello Murace, combined parts of their first names to create the unusual company name. (Though for some reason, Vincenzetto used the anglicized version of his first name (Charlie) rather than his native birth name.)
And as for the “Constellation II’ in the Lynx’s model name, it appears that the ‘II’ is to indicate that there was a previous Constellation (I) range, of which production ceased in 2016, and the ‘Constellation’ is because the Lynx is part of a Constellation ‘Series’ of speakers, the others in which are the already-mentioned Delphinus, the Cygnus and the Pegasus… names that are also attributed to constellations of stars.
As for how the Lynx Constellation of stars got its name, that’s actually pretty interesting in itself. It was so-named by Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius who created the constellation to fill a ‘gap’ between the two neighbouring constellations, Auriga and Ursa Major. He said he named it Lynx “because it was pretty faint and it took the eyesight of a lynx to see it.”
