Bassitude. How well a speaker's bass works a room is always up to the room. Modes are inherent to enclosed spaces. Corrective measures can include mega bass traps whose cubic volume remains effective into the low frequencies we want to absorb; chopping off resonance peaks in DSP; or using directional aka cardioid bass. But if a speaker overloads a room, it's not its fault. It's ours. We put a rhino into a porcelain shop. That said, some low-reaching speakers can be unusually unfussy because its engineers were clever. With its 28Hz port tuning below resonance of most rooms likely to host it, Corinium didn't ride my lower mode as so many competitors did before. Those were categorically unlistenable without first rerouting bass to our 2×15" cardioid subwoofer. Corinium even triggered my 70Hz mode less though here I've no clue as to why or how. Suffice it to say that with our active analog 100Hz/4th-order crossover in play, remaining resonances reduced even more. That was due to the 'super' dipole i.e. Ripole dispersion of the sub. Yet Corinium was perfectly listenable full-range relative to room reactivity and left little reach under the table. That could read suspicious given small woofers. Hitting a solid 40Hz simply tends to be sufficient on most music and these woven-fibre units were up to that job. Splendid.

In previous reviews of first Raidho's hi-tech multi-skin metal drivers then Scansonic's carbon-fibre versions from the same design team, I concluded that the latter were warmer as though they shifted away from a tone's initial attack into its following bloom portion. AE's woven membranes expressed the same effect. They were mellower on the leading edge, meatier on the follow-through. Just so, the novel textile tweeter had surprising resolution to inject articulation into slight softness. Some writers ascribe soundstaging to loudspeakers per se. In my experience it's primarily correct setup. When spaced and toe-in as above, pretty much all speakers I review cast a cavernous stage. The differences which remain have, I believe, mostly to do with more/less crossover phase shift and dispersion patterns. In any case, Corinium imaged just as you'd hope a mini monitor would which its top portion duplicates; well sorted, broad, specific and layered. It's thus applicable to think of this as a monitor bolted to a passive subwoofer in a unified cab. Again, special appreciation is due AE's ported alignment. I found it rather more real-world groomed hence unproblematic than many competitors I hosted before. That still doesn't inoculate you from buying too much speaker of course but in a standard-sized room of 5×6 or 6x8m, Corinium ought to integrate rather easier than overly ambitious 'forced' bass alignments. That's a key asset if like me, you call out overdone boomy bass as the most obnoxious thing a hifi can get wrong. After having ascertained Corinium's bass attitude as admirably extended and at that surprisingly unproblematic in practice, I returned to my usual 2.1 division of labour. That looked at playback's heartland under my very best domestic conditions so identical to how our residential Qualio IQ speakers configure. After all, getting hung up on minor remaining room interference when that's not the speaker's fault would be both unfair and silly if a quick solution is on hand.

Exotic tweeters. Even Vivid Audio's Laurence Dickie who always swore by his catenary aluminium-dome profiles has embraced diamond-like carbon vapor deposition for his new 13-driver Moya flagship. Then there are graphite, beryllium and actual diamond tweeters, never mind post-patent folded Oscar Heil variants and true aluminium ribbons à la Raal. For a soft dome, Corinium's Tetoron tweeter actually is another exotic. Capable of surprising air(s) and upper-harmonic shimmer, it bolts on a bit of Sonnet/Metrum freshness atop the textile midrange's more Denafrips-voiced lower separation. Whilst outright incisiveness or 3rd-harmonic type focus remain off this menu, there's enough nuanced resolution shining downward from the tweeter range to counteract a Roman orgy of thickness in the bigger bandwidth scheme. I first came across vented mids with the French Davis Acoustics Courbet N°5 though in my yearbook Franck Tchang in Paris had predated their ports with tiny decompression bores in his ASI Tango R. Even Meze's sealed Liric II sports a small vent hole. In 2024 I now came off dipole aka open-baffle mids. It's made me sensitive to box-talk effects across the vocal range. Whilst Corinium lacked our usual IQ's deep-throat immediacy and speed, I was convinced that its freer loading of the vocal units still offset otherwise inherent compression. Aside from tonal balance, speaker voicing also pegs where our virtual needle hovers on an axis whose end stops are soft dark substance and damped ultra precision. Think of it as a system's textural balance. It could be reverb-rich or a clipped mechanical cadence. It could be heavy and dense or accelerated and inside-out lit up. In the most basic terms, it determines our stage distance. Sitting close emphasizes transients and separation. Sitting removed emphasizes reflections, bloom and connective tissue. Everyone has their favourite concert seats. Those correspond exactly to how much direct and reflected sound makes up the mix at the ear. It's a purely personal choice just as are preferred SPL.

To my ears, Corinium's textural balance was closer to the farfield than nearfield effect. Even with wide-bandwidth fast gain circuits driving it, it injected some cohesive binder. That contextual continuity linked up all of a recording's various images in togetherness. Call it benign glue logic. In headfi terms it's a typical planarmagnetic not dynamic or ribbon sound. Considering just how popular planar headfi has become, Corinium would seem to have its finger deftly on the pulse of our times. It won't produce any dry overdamped max-res reading. Yet its needle setting remains central enough to not default into humidity or undue warmth. When hifi nutters talk of organic sound, I think Corinium's balance is exactly what they have in mind. It's why I inserted the earlier Denafrips reference. In digital, their voicing pursues very similar goals. Their discrete R2R approach is very popular, too. By that metric, Corinium's prospective popularity just squared to smile at fans of Meze isodynamic headphones and Denafrips digital. In amplifier terms from my circle of acquaintances, I'd pick a class A Pass Labs XA25. To say it all over again but inverted, what Corinium is not is a Raal ribbon headphone, Chord digital, Kinki or Alberto Guerra GaNFet amp. If just one of those names drops your internal penny, mission accomplished.