Kendall Beefcake

KLH’s floorstander is an awful lot of speaker for the money, but does it have the sound to match its size? David Vivian decides

- David Vivian

Our hi-fi journeys might mirror McCartney’s long and winding road, but a short time after setting off some travellers will encounter a challenging curve. Let’s call it buying speakers and the circa £1,300 price point dilemma. Once, the best advice would have been to go for a monitorclass standmount, prioritising quality over quantity, but things aren’t quite as clear cut any more.

Comparably priced big floorstanders have undergone a fairly radical repertoire reset in recent years, offering a real (if value-orientated) taste of that high-end holy grail: fusing a wide power bandwidth with speed, resolution and refinement.

For me, the switch-up game-changer has been Bowers & Wilkins’ £1,249 603 (HFC 448), a beefy, well-built, three-way Brit tower dripping with trickle-down tech from its more expensive model lines that does so many things so well. My only regret is that it wasn’t immediately followed up by the speaker you see here: reinvigorated American brand KLH’s virtually identical take on a high-performance, three-way floorstander that’s nigh on the same size and weight, shooting for the same lofty sonic goals and costing only slightly more. It’s named after Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the town of its (original) maker’s birth.

Regular readers will have already seen the KLH Albany two-way standmount last month and know that the company relaunched last year in the US with former president of global sales and Klipsch board member David P Kelly in the driving seat and now the venerable brand is selling its rebooted lineup worldwide, distributed in the UK by Dublin-based TBM Solution.