A Kinnara in the wrong box
After half a year of hemming and hawing, a few of us got a pair of Kinnaras finished just in time for Noising 2026, Singapore's DIY hi-fi meet, on 15 August 2026. We did not build the cabinet. We bought one — and it was the wrong size.
The cabinet we used
None of us are cabinet makers, so we bought a ready-made enclosure in real ebony veneer for S$166 the pair. It measures 65 × 30 × 28 cm with 18 mm walls and a 27 mm baffle, sealed, giving roughly 38 litres.
SB Acoustics do not publish a net internal volume for the Kinnara. Working from their cabinet drawing — a 1098 mm floorstander, 330 mm wide, 270 mm deep, with panels running diagonally at 10° to break up vertical standing waves — the raw internal envelope comes to about 72 litres, and our estimate of the net volume after those diagonals, the drivers and the crossover is somewhere around 50 to 60 litres. Treat that as an estimate, not a specification.
Mark Thomsen at SB pointed out the risk directly when he saw the photos: change the spacing between the drivers and the summation through the crossover region changes with it, along with the baffle diffraction the crossover was designed around. Both are real, and neither is something a listening test can fully disguise.
What it sounded like
Conditions first, so you can discount appropriately. A room of roughly 500 square feet, speakers well out from the walls with more than half a metre behind them, tweeters at ear height — though plenty of people were sitting in the middle and at the back of the space rather than in a sweet spot. Amplifiers were swapped on the same track back to back but were not level matched.
- Bass held to 50–60 Hz, then rolled away cleanly. No thump, no boom, no one-note character. Audibly less deep than the 45 Hz system specification — which is about what losing a third of the box should cost, and not much more.
- Relaxed presence with no metal-dome glare at all. For an aluminium tweeter crossed at 2300 Hz that is not an accident: an 8-inch cone is already beaming by 2.3 kHz while a 26 mm dome is still radiating wide, and the resulting power response makes the speaker easy to sit in front of for hours.
- The crossover was inaudible. Nothing announced itself at 2300 Hz.
- It filled the room like a mildly warm blanket, yet stayed detailed — breath and diction intact on voices, proper attack and stop on percussion. It held up for listeners at the back of the room, not only at the sweet spot, which surprised us most given the driver spacing.
On amplifiers
SB rate the Kinnara at 84 dB and 6 Ω nominal, and recommend 100–200 W. Here is the real-world version of that.
- 2.5 W single-ended triode: not enough. It could not play comfortably loud in that space. If you are building these, do not plan around flea-watt tubes.
- 30 W tube: entirely comfortable in ~500 square feet.
- Tube versus class A solid state versus class D: the audible differences were in the midrange and treble, not the bass.
The useful lesson
By any reasonable expectation, a third less volume and the wrong driver spacing should have produced a compromised speaker. Run the numbers and you can see why it didn't. At around 55 litres the system Q lands near 0.95 with a corner near 56 Hz; at our roughly 36 litres net it is about 1.08 and 63 Hz. We traded five to seven hertz of extension for a slightly larger midbass lift.
That is a small penalty for a large mistake, and the reason is the 1000 µF capacitor in series with the woofer. Because the capacitor sets the low-frequency behaviour more than the cabinet does, the Kinnara is unusually forgiving of enclosure volume errors. Most sealed designs would not have been.
We would still build it to the drawing next time. But if you are choosing between an off-the-shelf cabinet that is close and no speaker at all, this design gives you more room to be wrong than most.
Come and listen.
Bring your favourite tracks. Leave with something you'll keep for decades. No pressure, no commission-chasing.