Cobracabana. Struck by inspiration not madness as it turned out, Cobra next factored in another nearfield setup albeit with 'endless' space behind it. I'd recently set up this small system to anchor an evening Osho meditation against a Deuter soundtrack. I sit on a small pillow in half lotus on the couch, both speakers aimed straight at me with more than four metres behind them and great sidewall clearance. Before swapping in Cobra looks like a free day pass to hifi's CIA—Critic's Insane Asylum—more boilerplate basics. The closer speakers are to us, the less sidewall reflections intrude. The farther sidewalls and front wall are, the longer their reflections must travel to lose output hence severity. Close proximity decommissions the need for high SPL to sink less energy into the room in the first place. Add steep toe-in and for most intents and purposes, the room stops to matter in the seat. Of course go walkabout and you'll step through hotspots and mud zones. Unless someone else occupies those spots whilst you listen, there's simply nobody to notice like that famous tree falling in the forest. Against this backdrop, it's suddenly not as mad to move a speaker which overpowered another room of similar size in a 'free-space' setup to this room's nearfield sans high-pass filter. To obey Cobra's 'feed me power' demand engraved on its lower back panel, I simply swapped out this 50wpc i5 Simon Audio Lab integrated for their 150wpc/8Ω AIO model. Once fired up, I thought I'd gone to heaven and met Clecobratra. But I made it back to tell the tale.

For the full show 'n' tell, let's start with the show. For this occasion, the Dynaudio sub was out of the loop. And whilst the stands might look too tall, in my elevated erect posture, Cobra's AMT were in fact at ideal ear level. It's why I already have an order in with sound|kaos for taller custom stems with which to raise these solid-wood Vox3. Below the break you see four different perspectives on Cobra to illustrate the space around it. It shows how creating a listening zone rather than orienting the entire room around a hifi altar can be more than just sonically advantageous. Identifying a speaker fit for purpose so visually compact but aurally mighty is another matter which Cobra uniquely addressed. Unlike in my office where I must hear myself think to work, this nearfield scenario was groomed for dedicated auditioning. Enter higher SPL and more bombastic fare. The resultant conjunction of qualities is hard to explain.

As covered here, it creates an extended quasi-surround bubble of capacious depth. This perspective lives somewhere between first-rate headphones and classic mid/farfield speaker setups. It's intimate because we're in it, immersive for its grandeur. Intimate and vast usually don't go together. Here they were friends with benefits. The mind-blowing aspect occurred in the bassment. With a dual 9½" force-cancelling sealed active sub for reference, Cobra left no stone unturned and with its stereo coverage actually unearthed more. Stereo 2.1/2.2 users know how the 3rd dimension of space only fully materializes in the presence of true sub bass. Whilst mini monitors might seem spacious, the addition of proper LF artillery suddenly renders the 'without' spacey: improperly anchored. Despite going through the motions, their shallow oil well comes up empty. Once the black stuff gushes, our body/mind reacts differently. It's about scale, presence and greater realism as in, greater suspension of disbelief. That experience isn't novel. Big floorstanders with ambitious LF alignments deliver it when set up correctly in an appropriately sized and/or fully treated room to not backfire by stirring up more mud than good. Getting exactly the same robust gravitationally complete read from passive compacts on stands, without room protestations, was novel; very novel. It also clearly eclipsed Viper. This wasn't about a few extra cycles of reach. It was about a demonstrable substantializer action across the bandwidth. Whilst it's a UFO sighting bound to generate Unsolicited Ferocious Objections, this setup instantly became my favourite of the three; a bit like hovering in a glass bubble above the Grand Canyon so perfectly safe yet with the body still sensing the presence of very real danger. That acute danger sense—unless you're simply unafraid of heights—is my literary stand-in for Cobra's more intense presence. It's not a mind thing registered coolly by the upstairs calculator. It's a bodily reaction like some quicksilver coursing through the gut. What prevented this stunt from going pear-shaped and thunder-thighed were these industrially braced tall air-motion transformers. They gave the dark soil aspects and global chunkiness a sunny disposition.

Was it reasonable to allocate today's considerable fiscal resources and frankly extreme design parameters to such a quasi nearfield array? Purely on sight and wallet wince, certainly not. Yet having the actual experience quickly cancels out any such mundane objections. If it works so fabulously well, why the hell not? No need to fly to Rio de Janeiro for its famous 4km long Copacabana beach. Enjoy a permanent home vacation on the Cobracabana. Direct from overcast rainy Ireland, it's my image into which to condense unadulterated enthusiasm. Consider me stumped, too. 23 years on this beat have netted a few personal firsts. As time moves on, those have become far fewer also because I don't really breach a certain price ceiling. Knowing my place, I leave that stuff to writers like Jonathan Valin, Robert Harley and Jason Victor Serinus. But by late November 2025, I found myself once again staring at a personal first: true unconditional full-range performance bottled by a passive bookshelf speaker then uncorked at a scale that just shouldn't be. But as it turned out, Cobra wasn't done with me yet.