Kali Audio IN5-5" Active Studio Monitor, Black (Single Unit)

Product Information

In Dire Straits’ Money For Nothin the opening guitar is panned around the stage and mixed out of phase, to the left of the soundstage. The IN-5s did a great job of providing a very distinct location of this out-of-phase effect while also providing clear separation between the same guitar that is located more closely to the center. Kalis products are designed and engineered in California, and each of our product lines is named after a town or city in California. Lone Pine, our debut line of studio monitors, gets its name from a town in the Eastern Sierra from which climbers disembark to summit Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the lower 48 states. Much like this climb, we felt that our debut line was ambitious, challenging, and a little risky. Mountain View, an accessory for connecting Bluetooth devices with professional audio systems, was named after the town in which several large tech companies, including Google, are headquartered. As these companies insist on removing physical audio connectors from their devices, we thought this name would be a fun way to put them on notice. A version of Kali is always close to you, no matter where you need it. Mobile devices, Containers, ARM, Cloud providers, Windows Subsystem for Linux, Pre-built Virtual Machine, Installer Images, and others are all available. Kali Audio was started in January 2018 by some of the Professional Audio Industry’s most passionate individuals. With engineering at the forefront, Kali aims to make loudspeakers and related products that present the best possible value to our customers. By devoting time and resources to research and development, and with a little bit of panache, we offer high-performance products that fit any budget.

In use, it’s remarkable. Monitoring in mono sounds like a pair of IN-5s collapse into a single phantom speaker sitting between them. Break out a mix to stereo and the clarity across the horizontal plane is incredibly precise. One way of knowing this accuracy can be credited to the coaxial mids and tweeter is how audibly the most solid imaging sits higher in the vertical sound field. The tight phase coherency of the point source design lends the IN-5 a ‘togetherness’ in tonal character; a firm, glued-together, assertive presentation of material. This design, say Kali, delivers a “stereo soundstage that presents the listener with a hyper-realistic level of detail. The soundstage that you hear will have every detail that’s present in the mix”. The IN-Series monitors have very low distortion. This is the result of unburdening both the woofer and the tweeter, so that both are doing less work; the tweeter is only focused on high frequencies, and the woofer only has to worry about bass. So here we weren’t really expecting that claimed greater sweet spot but we certainly got it, so much so we nearly wore our chair wheels out rolling around the studio space finding its limits. We’ve enjoyed reviewing the IN-8s so much that it almost pains us that we can’t recommend them to everyone.We know. We keep harping on about the “hyper-realistic” imaging of the IN-Series. What does that mean?

The only issue here was that we weren’t expecting this euphoric moment as these speakers come in at half the price of our reference monitors. At best we were expecting them to hopefully match the response of the more expensive speakers; instead they gave us that ‘wow’ moment anyway.

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The IN-Series solves this problem. The tweeter and midrange share an acoustic center, and the woofer is crossed over at a low-mid frequency, so the distance between the woofer and midrange is well under a quarter wavelength at the crossover point. This means that each IN-Series monitor is acoustically a point source. As such, it has the same excellent directivity that the LP-6 and LP-8 have at their sides in a full 360 degrees around the speaker. You’re hearing all of the spatial information at the listening position, so the soundstage that you hear will have every detail that’s present in the mix. Clarity The T7v would be my minimum for an Adam, as the T5v only goes to 106 dB (103 for a single one I believe) which isn't low, but for some dynamic peaks it will be, and however it's handling distortion I don't like. The Devialet Phantom Reactor claims only 98dB but it doesn't sound as ragged when it's hitting that. The Industry Standard Kali Linux is not about its tools, nor the operating system. Kali Linux is a platform. These compact monitors from new company Kali Audio strike an enticing balance between performance and affordability." - Sound on Sound