"I anticipate having everything assembled tomorrow. If the weekend goes according to plan, I will send them to you on Monday with expedited shipping." Cobra was shaping up to be even more bonkers than expected. I was thrilled that Greg supplied us with so much background insights and images. Without them we'd not properly appreciate just how ambitious and detail-intense of a project this became. With other €10K speakers ensconced in gloss-lacquered HDF sourced from China, we must take it a face value that was goes into them justifies the tariff. With Cobra, we now know precisely what goes into them: buckets worth of OCD. Let's call it optimum concept directive to eliminate the undertone of a malaise.

Once I had tracking numbers, I also had Greg's final photo. He had some fun with the back-panel engraving. Aside from "Feed me power" it also has "Bite me!". Mongoose alert? Why did he not place the terminals in the bottom corners to shorten the reach of our cables and avoid running them right next to an exposed driver? Knowing how sardine-can packed Cobra's innards are whilst its stacked cabs bolt firmly together, it must have taken time to perfect the ideally sequenced assembly protocol. My tracker showed two 30kg/ea. crates in transit so Cobra would travel securely ensconced behind wood and metal edge rails. Whilst monitoring progress, I wondered about finally welcoming Cobra atop my stands. My eyes still struggled to make out seamless cosmetic coherence between smooth acrylic white baffles with protruding lips against textured sides then flat black steel panels plus industrial tweeter braces on top. Compared to the monolithic white Viper I looked at directly whilst typing this, I still felt a bit ambivalent about the hyper version's styling. Would 'in the flesh' make all the difference?

The magnetic acrylic dress panels stowed away in their own naturally 3D-printed box. So did the AMT with their pre-mounted braces. The only minor assembly involved six small hex bolts per channel to affix the tweeters. Then off it was with the crisp crates into indoor storage; and with Cobra onto 28" stands in my office bought to suit Viper. They put Cobra's upper dynamic drivers on ear level, the tweeters above. With instant proof of life—transit hadn't interfered in any way—it was time to answer the fleshy question.

I found the new micro textures of the sides, top and bottom superb. They suggest a luxurious woman's hand bag whose fabric sports a classy repetitive pattern. As such I'd personally fancy it wrapped around the front. But Grzegorz clearly got pushback that paying clients prefer a more classically smooth façade. His hot-swappable solution provides just that. Brilliant. Hot flesh instead of flash?

Acknowledging off the bat that for nearfield office purposes, Cobra was flagrant overkill to be mere pitstop towards my bigger rigs, how about sonic comments versus Viper? Since I'd not play louder, how would scaled-up air motion register? The central so third tweeter output is the default. Moving toward the front baffle adds voltage, moving back reduces it.