CHARIO CONSTELLATION II LYNX
LOUDSPEAKERS
If you’re a small, boutique hi-fi manufacturar that wants to save money on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the products you’re making, one way to do this is by cutting down on your photography costs, because professional photo shoots are expensive. And one way to do this is to build products that look identical, so you can get a profes- sional photographer to shoot one model, then use the same photographs for all your other models. Now I am not saying that this is the reason that Chario’s Constellation II Lynx looks identical to the Chario Constellation II Delphinus, but there’s no doubt that- in photographs at least-the two appear to be absolutely identical.
However, just as the mother of identical twins can tell them apart, Chario’s designer could easily point out the differences to you, and if you see them side-by-side in the flesh, so to speak, you wouldn’t have any difficulty telling them apart either. For starters, the Lynx is the ‘baby’ in the Constellation II range, at just 360mm high (50mm less high than the Delphinus), and just 200mm wide and deep (compared to the Delphinus at 230mm wide and 330mm deep).
And although the Lynx shares the same oddly large tweeter as the Delphinus, it has a smaller bass/midrange driver... one that’s rated with a diameter of 130mm, as against the Delphinus’s 160mm bass/mid driver.
It’s worth noting right here in the intro- duction that the ‘II’ indicates that in fact there was originally a Chario Constellation Lynx, so the model reviewed here is an updated version of that original loudspeaker (about which I’ll go into in more detail in the main body of the review). I don’t think that’s really made clear by using just two Roman numerals (II) so I have used ‘MkII’ through- out this review to make it more
