Role Audio Canoe Loudspeaker Review

The Canoe has a one-inch-diameter soft dome tweeter and a four-inch woven carbon fiber midrange/woofer. Unlike most small monitors, which need some form of speaker stand to place the drivers at a proper height or angle so there is no attenuation of upper frequencies when placed on a desktop, the Canoe was designed so that, when it’s used for nearfield desktop listening, the drivers are at the ideal height vis-a-vis your ears. On my 28-inch-high desktop, the Canoe’s tweeter was one inch below my ear height without any stands or elevation devices.The Canoe’s crossover employs a film foil capacitor, metal oxide resistor, and a laminated perfect lay coil. Hand-wired and soldered with DH Labs silver-plated copper wire to the tweeter and oxygen-free multi-strand copper wire to the woofer, the Canoe uses one set of Superior insulated five-way binding posts mounted on a terminal cup to facilitate wall or near-wall placement. Bi-wiring is not available.Intro of Clutch System Clutch is actually situated at the flywheel shell between

For audiophiles who are concerned with ecological or personal health issues, the Canoe is made using certified green birch plywood and CARB2 MDF, which has no urea formaldehyde to off-gas into your environment. Also, Role employs non-toxic glues and paints throughout its manufacturing process. The Canoe comes with a black fabric grille that’s held in place with magnets rather than push-in attachments. This makes for a much cleaner look when the grilles are removed. Most of my listening time was spent sans grilles.Installing the Canoe speakers in my desktop system was simple. The most time-consuming part was removing the GoldenEar Aon 2 speakers, along with the Ultimate Support speaker stands and high-density foam risers beneath them. After the desktop was vacated, I merely placed the Canoes at equidistant positions on either side of my NEC 26-inch monitor and then angled them in so that, from my listening position, I couldn’t see their sidewalls. To make sure that both speakers were angled identically, I used the free iPhone/iPad app from Genelec speakers called “SpeakerAngle”. After initial setup, I found that extremely small changes in the speakers’ physical locations could result in big differences in soundstage presentation. Even a cat brushing the speakers as it walked across my desk could move the speakers enough that they required repositioning.