Penaudio Cenya
Penaudio Cenya must be one of the most successfully shaped and designed standmount loudspeaker on the market. It is not quite as cool and sexy looking as the slimmer Charisma. What makes it a bit more common is its 6 inch mid/woofer that makes the front panel wider. But it is nicely proportionated thanks to its depth (31cm) that exceeds the height by a few cm (28cm). This form gives a speaker authority and weight that almost all other monitors lack. In fact, Cenya makes standard monitors with the height twice the depth look inferior, fool even.
The review individual was finished (the top, sides and the bottom) with an oak ply matching splendidly with the stripes of the 1,5mm Penaudio Birch Plywood veneer (front and rear). The cabinet itself is made of 19mm Finnish MDF. Penaudio's loudspeakers - all of them - have a rare property that they let the wood come naturally forward and shine. Cenya is no exception. It is not overdone, swanky. Just a piece of honest wood work. Italian and Danish designers have other ideas.
The form is appealing but how about stands? Stands didn't come along but the design of Cenya certainly poses the question of an aesthetically suitable stand. For reasons presented later, Cenya has to be placed on a stand. It cannot and should not be hidden in a bookshelf, nor kept near the neigboring walls. I've seen pictures of Cenya standing on top of a round pipe. Not good, not good at all. Cenya looks like an orphan. It cannot be that difficult to design a stand that would compliment the design of the Cenya. But is there such a stand available?
Cenya is a 2-way 4-ohm monitor. In addition to the 145mm Seas Excel magnesium coned mid/woofer (with heavy copper rings above and below pole piece, and radial reinforced surround) it features a 20mm ferrofluid cooled textile dome tweeter. It too is by Seas, and crossed at 4000 cycles. The announced frequency (anechoic) response +-3dB is 45-28000Hz, and in room 40-25000Hz. Other features include: WBT binding posts, Jorma Design internal wiring.
A preliminary point about listening to a loudspeaker chez moi. I don't care about a speaker being good or bad, better or worse. My aim is just to understand and describe the way in which a speaker sounds, and only that. To understand and describe a sound is fundamentally not a matter of hearing (perceiving) something but being able to conceptualize what one has heard. Hearing is essentially a cognitive and linguistic skill.
Sonically
To listen to Penadio Cenya is a very pleasing experience. Not just in some vague general sense but in a typical-to-Penaudio way. It would not be fair to Cenya to listen to music by studiously thinking what takes place in it. Cenya is not a speaker for musical dissection. But listen to music, just like that, and Cenya will reward you with a flutter of good will and spirit, like a soft summer wind. This is Penaudio as I've learned to know it.
Thanks to its symphatetic tonal character combined with certain calmness, Cenya - as other Penaudio loudspeakers I've heard - can assume different kind of music styles and genres without contradiction or aggression. Audiophile Test-CDs with diverse music samples cause no headache to Cenya. To be an omnivore does not preclude that a loudspeaker would not have its own favourites: Cenya gently persuades to develop listening habits toward soft and not too complex vocal music. Also, instruments such as an acoustic guitar sound particularly resonant with Cenya.
Cenya sounds clean and open without appearing especially revelatory. Once again Penaudio shows how to strike a balance between analycity and warmth. In a tradoff-situation, Cenya chooses the latter. But even when Cenya sounds sweet, mellow and fairly full-bodied, it does not sound straighforwardly dull. It sounds pleasurable but in a quick-minded way. This I regard as an achievement.
There are two quite obvious reasons why Cenya is unlikely to irritate any normal music listener sauf audiophile purists, perhaps. One is its bass and the other is its treble. In this respect too Cenya reminded me of other Penaudio speakers, Sinfonia most lately.
Cenya has enormous reserves of bass energy for its size. If I'm asked it can fill in even a larger room with a luscious bass. My listening room is not big one but it opens up from both sides to another room so that speakers have volume to breath and spread out their bass reservoirs. I've got several loudspeakers in my room, some ten times bigger than the Cenya, and not one has managed to boost the bass frequencies and wake up room resonances in an unacceptable manner. Nor did Cenya (80cm from the wall behind) but it made it quite clear that it should not be given a chance to do so.
Thanks to its bass section Cenya can make an electric bass sound strong and cool; it can make a piano sound surprisingly believable and full-bodied; etc. But also, there is no doubt that it's the bass that is behind Cenya's enchantingly generous and pleasant overall sound. There is a danger here too. In order to prevent the bass from dominating, Cenya should not allowed to emphasize its bass reserves eg. by keeping it too closely to the walls. The risk is not just a coloured bass but also that the Cenya will make all music sound inappropriately forgiving. Some people might like it but I'm sure many would enjoy of a more realistic performance.
Let me make my point clear. I once heard a speaker with a vintage 8" widebandwidth driver. It wasn't a remarkable speaker. The sound was dry and rather bassless. Yet only very rarely have I heard a sound that would more favourably support Bach's chamber music (piano/violin especially). The reason why it worked so greatly was that the midrange was void of any backing by the low frequency reproduction, say, below 400Hz! It wasn't the most pleasant sound but damn beautiful it was.
Cenya sounds pure and clean and distortionless, but is not meant to sound like a naked mid-range specialist. To make Cenya sound even partly as that vintage speaker, no help from the room is accepted. For most of us a little help from the room is not a problem but purists need to work out a position for Cenya where it would deliver as much as possible the direct sound, and as little as possible the reflected sound.
And then the treble. The new Seas tweeter is capable of producing very sophisticated, fine-grained high frequency contents. Even the highest harmonic overtones remain atypically informative. This property gives a certain silky character to Cenya's HF performance, and adds to the pleasantness of the overall sound. But how distinctive is the treble? I got the impression that the treble was somewhat incongruent. This can best be heard as a certain "thinness" not as such but in relation to the midrange (ie. below 4000Hz).
Imagine that a violinist played three octaves starting from the D string. As he gets to the higher notes, the sound gets naturally and gradually more pointed and restricted. What Cenya appears to do is that somewhere in the middle, from a certain note upwards, it makes the notes sound as if they were from an octave higher than they actually are. From that note upwards I would have preferred a tad more presence, width and energy (cymbals and saxphones would also have benefitted) than was the case now.
I'm quite sure that the bass that gets easily exited and silky but somewhat small-sounding treble are not random qualities of Cenya but something that people at Penaudio are fully aware of. These qualities as well as the harmonious and positive midrange are part of how Penaudio loudspeakers are designed to sound. They are active ingredients in that "auditive well-being" that Penaudio famously talks about in its company philosophy.
Two final points. Any soundstage? Yes, but I don't think that it's the number one preference of Cenya (nor mine). The center image of the Cenya is not noticeably strong: even mono recordings hover around the centre point rather than be steadfastly fixed to it (at least in my room). The music spreads evenly between the speakers and the depth of the sound is not pronounced. The sound is not forced to escape onto the back stage, and thus Cenya does not sound distant or distracted, which is good.
Second. Most of the time I drove the Cenya - against Penaudio's recommendations - with a 10-15W PP tube amp from its 4 ohm taps. I had no problem with the volume of the sound from the distance of roughly 3 metres, nor did I notice errors related to compressed dynamics, increased distorion etc. A standard transistor amp did not change the situation much in my case but should the controllability of the bass become a problem, high-power transistor amp is probably the truest amplifier for Cenya. However, care should be taken that Cenya's qualitites in the midrange are not annuled in the process, which was why I ended up in using the tube amp.
Penaudio Cenya, 2995 euro.
Specifications
Type: 2-way, stand mounted, reflex loaded; Drive units: ¾”(20mm) ferrofluid cooled textile dome tweeter (Seas), 6”(145mm)magnesium coned midrange/bass (Seas Excel) with heavy copper rings above and below pole piece, radial reinforced surround; Cross-over: 4000Hz; Frequency range: anechoic response +-3dB 45-28000Hz, in room response 40-25000Hz; Sensitivity: 86dB/1m/2.83V; Nominal impedance: 4ohms; Recommended amplifier: 50+W; Dimensions (WxHxD): (163x280x315)mm; Weight: 8kg. Specialities: Jorma Design wiring, Seas custom / excel drivers, WBT 0730.12 (Signature platinum) pole screws, SCR polypropylene capacitors, Graditech air-core inductors, aluminium reflex pipe, custom made finnish birch plywood veneer 22mm/16mm solid plywood cabinet.