AXPONA Debut: World’s First Active Hybrid Electrostatic Monitor — the JansZen Carmelita

World’s first active electrostatic monitor — the JansZen Carmelita Active
Debut at the AXPONA 2016 — Room 546

The acclaimed JansZen zA1.1 electrostatic hybrid loudspeaker has a new name and a new sibling: the self-amplified, floor-standing electrostatic hybrid Carmelita.

Aside from being compact and convenient, the new active Carmelita offers sonic improvements over the passive version regardless of the quality of the amplifiers being replaced. The clarity, timbre, tonal balance, and most importantly, the connection to the music are all significantly enhanced. One can really fall in love all over again.

The new Carmelita Active is an internally bi-amplified loudspeaker system. Each cabinet houses two 190W/8Ω amplifiers. Crossover and voicing are handled by built-in, advanced signal processing technology. An unusual, asymmetrical, low order crossover with Bessel characteristics results in very low ripple and phase skew while retaining the correct relationship between musical tones and overtones.

The Carmelita Active has a balanced input, easily adapted to single ended if needed. On the back of each speaker is a gain control to match the scale of any source output for best signal to noise ratio. For those with high grade portable sources, there’s enough gain to produce full volume when connected directly to sources with as little as 1V RMS maximum output.

The Carmelita Active ships from the factory with four pushbutton selected sonic profiles. The standard selections vary the bass level in 3 dB increments to accommodate a range of wall distances. We can also provide custom profiles, such as for extreme near field, extreme distance, hearing loss inversion, BBC dip, extra slam, etc..

As with all JansZen speakers, the directivity is controlled, which minimizes the room and well conserves recorded ambiance, for a you-are-there experience, rather than they-are-here.

The price is $7495 without the airLayer side tweeter, and $7890 with it.