Focal Kanta No.2

He still has the opinion of the bass being exaggerated in his closing remarks and expects that over damping is being applied to preclude the expected effect of bloated or excess boom, which is a very common practice applied to a good number of designs.

There is a downside to the practice and its often resulting in the bass not having quite the tactful, taught, and resolute sound. A good example of this comparison would be the Revel F208 and its very similarly configured Studio2. Driver compliments are nearly a match and they share a good deal of design traits. The bass driver arrangement is similar, but the F208 shows some elevated response and measures down a bit further compared to its much more elaborate stablemate. The F208 is damped further than the Studio2 and the overall bass depth is a bit more obscured due to the down vs. front ported design. The Studio2 shows greater speed, articulation, and resolve compared to the F208 in listening, but I will tell you in certain genres of music the F208's bass outshines its more expensive twin. This is highly recording specific and and is bit of more fun choice in the F208's implementation vs resolve in the Studio2. A massive amount of this has to do with how and on what a recording was mastered on and what platforms the recording was tested on when finalizing.

My expectation is something similar will play out in the Aria vs Kanta2. A choice for greater faster and more articulate bass was likely made also with a goal of reduced distortion. That is something I see across Focal's upper end designs as they really try to push distortion much lower in upper end designs.  The Kanta2 is certainly taking its page from the Sopra series.

I don't think you're very far off in your assessment, however, I think that overlooks the strangeness in the port alignment. The 3 woofers don't appear to behave identically and I think that may be how they negate the more obvious artifacts of over-damping while enjoying the benefits. 

I wouldn’t put much stock in bad bass experiences as that is heavily room and position dependent.

i heard them and did not hear any significant deficiency.

i doubt all the good press the kanta2 received was a fallacy.

The bottom two woofers in the Aria 936 have low crossover point at the same frequency and slope, with the minor differences seen are mostly due to cabinet placement and are acoustic in nature. The top woofer shares the same low cross point and slope but not high crossover, as the slope is reduced, most likely improving the mid range integration. Both front ports and bottom ports are tuned to the same point.

The Kanta2 has a similar height, width, but bit more depth with a smaller number of drivers, which gives the woofers a bit more cabinet volume to work with. They should perform inline with speakers using similarly sized woofers, but always remember designers have differences on how much distortion they want to allow their system to produce. A smaller woofer will require greater excursion to achieve this with the countering factor will be increasing distortion. Focal tends to lean towards minimizing this distortion and will keep high order crossover slopes in order to do so. This is giving up on the very lowest octaves that aid in giving room pressurization but keeps a cleaner mid and upper bass area in addition to the lower midrange. Compromises in anything.

Someone listed a pair of Kanta here yesterday in bright yellow.  May still be for sale.