ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM SEPTEMBER 2006

Infinity Cascade Speaker System

Flat and fit.

BY MARK FLEISCHMANN
How would you feel if you

woke up one day in a perfect body? You’d pull back the blanket and look down on a perfectly flat tummy (something I haven’t seen in years, although heaven knows I’m trying). Combination skin is a thing of the past—you seem to have been remade in some wonderful mate- rial. Eager to check yourself out in a mirror, you cross the room to find yourself resculpted in new and slimmer proportions. And, when you open your mouth, depending on your gender, you

have either the purest soprano or the noblest baritone. In fact, you have both. I think this metaphor may be getting a bit perverse.

The point I’m meandering my way around to is that Infinity’s new Cascade line reimagines every aspect of the loudspeaker. The newest feature is a reshaped woofer, a flat, rectangluar diaphragm that’s not cone shaped. The woofer and the tweeter are both made of a proprietary ceramic/aluminum blend not

unfamiliar to Infinity fans. The
look is as distinctive as a finger- print, and the sound is superlative
in ways that correct ailments common to most speakers.
Oh MoMA

The Cascades could be in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Their newly designed, flat, rectangular woofers share the front with a conventional dome tweeter. Although they’re trimmed in plas- tic, the drivers actually attach to the underlying wood. The Model Seven floorstanding speaker presents an unbroken front surface; the high-gloss black of the speaker transitions to the stand’s gray matte aluminum.

The top of the Model Seven tapers back, making it appear slightly smaller than it really is. This tapering reappears on both ends of the Model Five monitor, the Model Three C center speaker, and the Model Fifteen subwoofer. The sides and the rear are constructed of curved extruded aluminum in matte black. When I knuckle- rapped the enclosures, I heard various pitches in various places, but they were all muted compared with the pitches of my fiberboard- enclosed reference speakers. These speakers are solid.

Conspicuous in its absence is the cone-shaped woofer that 99 percent of speaker designs employ. Round cones and sharp-cornered, rectangular speaker enclosures are easy to manufacture, but fitting the former into the latter is a waste of space. Boxy enclosures also

Cordero Studios