Loudspeakers

Inspired by KEF's flagship Reference range, its recently updated and more affordable R series was heralded by the standmount R3 [HFN Dec '18] – a speaker that caused sufficient stir here at HFN that we were keen to explore what its tallest floorstander, the R11, had to offer. And here it is, selling for a surprisingly modest £3999 a pair, and looking impressive in a choice of three finishes – black gloss, white gloss or walnut.

Who needs shifts in the weather when you can judge the time of year by hi-fi launches? Those of us who exist in the twilight world of hi-fi reviewing, and are strangers to Vitamin D, didn't need a chill in the air and the first signs of yellowed leaves swirling around to know it was autumn – instead, a flurry of press releases announced new or revamped speaker ranges, as the big names prepared for another season of long evenings and hunkered-down listening.

The giant professional KM1 apart, KEF has been pretty quiet in the large loudspeaker market during the past year or two. The Reference series has run on without much fanfare, and most of the action has been with the budget ‘C’ range, particularly the highly competitive Coda, now in Mark 3 guise.

Fortunately, the Reference 5 Meta is the £17,500 flagship of KEF's 'conventional' speaker range, bettered only by the striking-looking Blade designs [HFN May '22]. Fortunately? Well, yes, because this is an imposingly huge design, standing just over 1.4m tall, even if some of that impression of scale is minimised by the slenderness of the cabinets. Indeed, if the enclosures were any narrower than their 205mm, there wouldn't be room on the front baffle for the quartet of 165mm aluminium-coned bass drivers, arranged in pairs above and below the company's 12th-generation Uni-Q treble/midrange unit.

Kii Audio’s THREE is an exemplar of what can be achieved when the hi-fi industry’s, and hi-fi buyers’, lingering obsession with passive loudspeakers is set aside and a 21st century approach – active operation in conjunction with digital signal processing (DSP) – is adopted instead. In short order we’ve experienced the B&O BeoLab 90 [HFN Dec ’16], the KEF LS50 Wireless [HFN Oct ’17] and now the Kii (pronounced ‘key’) THREE.

Viewed from a modern perspective, there's more than an element of 'forget everything you know' about the latest incarnation of the Klipsch Klipschorn AK6, a classic now heading for its 80th birthday. It was designed in 1946 from earlier prototypes by company founder Paul W Klipsch – officially described by the US brand as 'genius, madman and maverick' – in an Arkansas tin shed, and it's been continuously made and refined ever since.