Frank Göbl, who leads development at Canton, likes music very loud. Tom Frantzen of STEREO magazine has known him for two decades and once joked that a pair Göbl delivered was broken in after one song of listening together. Steve Guttenberg notes that Canton designs and makes all of its own drivers rather than buying them off the shelf, and aluminum cones are a house hallmark. A stiff, light cone moves as one piece instead of flexing, so it adds less sound of its own, and on its top models Canton treats the cone's surface to make it stiffer still. Guttenberg calls the ceramic tweeter "the not-so-secret sauce" of the little Vento 20, and Ken Micallef of Stereophile found the Reference 7K produced "perhaps the widest soundstage" he had heard in his apartment. Canton suits listeners who want big, clear sound that stays composed at high volume.

Canton's stereo range climbs from GLE to Vento to Reference, and every few years it passes Reference technology down into a new Vento series. The Vento 100 is a good place to aim. Frantzen found it played full-bodied on little power while still fitting an average German living room. Its port fires down through the base, so Hi-Fi News says it minds a nearby wall less than rear-ported speakers do. Yongki Go of Secrets set his about 4 feet out with only 10 degrees of toe-in. If you need something smaller, there's the compact Vento 20, and Guttenberg suggests a subwoofer for bass fans. The step up is the Reference series, and Michael Lavorgna of Twittering Machines judged the Reference 2 better with high-power amplification. Micallef and Lavorgna both heard each amplifier's character through the Cantons, so choose electronics with care.

Canton began in October 1972, when four hifi enthusiasts, Günther Seitz among them, took over an empty village school and the vacant teacher's house in Weilrod in the Taunus hills. Seitz told the High End Society they realized after a few months that it was much too small. They started with 35 employees, and their competitors at the time were HECO and Braun. The name joins the Latin cantare, to sing, with the German word Ton. Canton's first success was the LE 250 of 1973, a compact two-way speaker. Michael Lang of STEREO describes the original Karat as a pioneer of the very slim column speaker with a woofer mounted on the side. For the 50th anniversary Seitz revived it as the Karat GS Edition, limited to 1972 pairs. Hi-Fi News calls Canton Germany's largest loudspeaker manufacturer, and Canton says it still builds about 240,000 drivers a year in the Czech Republic and assembles the speakers in Weilrod.