Canton Chrono 70 Loudspeaker - It's Chrono Time

Canton may be a speaker brand that’s relatively unknown in North America—no doubt due to the company’s products not being available in these parts for the past decade—but the German outfit has been doing business for almost 50 years. Headquartered about 25 miles north of Frankfurt, Canton is one of Germany’s largest loudspeaker manufacturers, offering a truly breathtaking spread of models across several product ranges.

- By Michael Trei

If you wanted to pluck a representative speaker out from the middle of Canton’s lineup, you’d most likely select the Chrono 70. The whole Chrono series resides somewhere in the middle of the company’s range, occupying a comfortable sweet spot between affordability and performance. One key advantage to this positioning is that the Chrono series leverages trickle-down technology from Canton’s more expensive lines—the Vento series’ Wave Surround rubber woofer suspension, for example, which permits greater driver excursion with less distortion.

The 70 is the smallest of three floorstanding towers within the Chrono series, with a couple of bookshelf models coming in just below it to complete the lineup. There’s also a Chrono center channel, subwoofer, on-wall, and an Atmos elevation model in case your plans include a full surround rig. But for this review we focused just on the Chrono 70, used alone as a stereo pair.

Many companies selling affordable speakers moved their production lines to Asia long ago, but Canton has resisted this temptation. Instead, it has chosen to consolidate operations within the EU, with flagship models manufactured in Germany and lower-cost lines like the Chrono produced across the border in the Czech Republic. This strategy allows Canton to hold costs down while keeping everything reasonably close to home.