Specs & Pricing

The Cutting Edge
Everything I treasure in a speaker can be
found in Kharma’s superb little package
guitar, a variety of percussion, and piano—are laid out in my listening
room with a highly convincing recreation of scale (both in size and
relationship to one another) and a tactile physical presence. And
because my room is small and I listen in the near-field, the Mini’s slightly
forward projection makes for a thrillingly lifelike experience. There are
essentially no speaker boundaries, and the air of the soundstage has
enormous width, height, and depth. And as the musicians interact with
one another, the air in my room becomes vibrantly charged with their
instruments’ energy. Whether from a fat sforzando piano chord that leaps
forth before slowly lingering back into nothingness, the quick barrooming
bulge of a tympani thwack, the angry sounding pizzicatos of the violin,
the classical guitar’s flamenco-like chords and arpeggios, or the in and
out pulse of the player’s breath as it flows though the flute’s body. This
recording also demonstrates the Mini’s wonderful way with “bloom” or
“action.” As the flute, or really any of the other instruments, increase
or decrease their output volume, you hear just that, their volume—as in
size—blossom and wilt, while moving forward and then receding back
into the soundstage.
These descriptions bring to mind something Kharma’s Charles van
Oosterum told me about his design goals—that he wants his speakers
to retrieve as much information as possible without, as he put it in
his Dutch-accented English, “added colorations, interpretations, and
without magnifying the soundstage.” As he sees it, this is a major
challenge for all speaker designers, “considering that every part used in
a speaker introduces its own sonic footprint into the sound, and this on
more levels than one considers at first.”
To control structural resonance, Kharma starts with carefully selected
enclosure materials. For the beautifully finished and striking-looking
36" tall, 95-pound Mini Exquisite, this is a proprietary, 30mm-thick
high-pressure laminate that debuted in Kharma’s $250,000 Grand
Exquisite (where it is actually 40mm thick). Said to be twenty times as
costly as MDF, this material offers just what van Oosterum seeks in his
enclosures—an ideal combination of rigidity and internal damping. The
diamond tweeter is housed in its own chamber, and substantial internal
bracing and internal diffusers are built into the Mini’s entire structure. A
cast and round-lipped aluminum vent is fitted into the rear-firing port
found just above Kharma’s custom binding-post station, and a heavyduty
base structure bolts to the enclosure’s bottom panel, into which
large and pointy feet are threaded. These in turn sit on protective and
non-resonant discs, whether the speaker rests on carpet or hardwood.
Speaking of diamonds, while several top speaker makers are using
diamond tweeters for their extreme rigidity and lightness, Kharma is
among the few to use a 25mm (one-inch) dome rather than the much
more common 19mm (.75-inch) variety. Van Oosterum tells me that the
diamond is made in a microwave plasma reactor in accordance with the
poly-diamond-deposition method, in which the reactor is loaded with
gas and the diamond is deposited on a mold to create the desired shape.
The thickness of the diamond is directly related to its time in the plasma
reactor, and it takes an enormous amount of energy for the diamond
to reach its ideal thickness, which in this case is 60 microns—or thinner
than a sheet of paper. Kharma’s U.S. importer Bill Parish of GTT Audio
added that, in addition to its 25mm inverted diamond-dome, each of
the Exquisite tweeter’s remaining parts—from wires to magnets to voice
coil—are made exclusively for Kharma and final assembly is done inhouse.
As you might imagine, such tweeters are both extremely delicate
(a protective removable screen is part of the kit) and costly items—
roughly the same price as a case of first-growth Bordeaux.
Similarly pricey (if not nearly as) and just as fragile is the 7" ceramic
bass/midrange driver. Protected by a mesh grille to keep it, too, from
ending up like Humpty-Dumpty’s shell, the ceramic mid/bass driver in
the Exquisite series differs from most others, including those in other
Kharma models, such as the terrific little Ceramique 3.2 that had been
100 December 2006 The Absolute Sound