Kali’s Ultimate Speaker

Kali’s founding principle is to deliver the best possible product for the price. Our speakers have always been praised for their accuracy, translation, and ease of use. The SM-Series builds on these ideals, and incorporates the best available materials, components, and manufacturing.

The result is a high performance studio monitor that is ready for the most demanding mixing and mastering applications.

Kali’s finest speaker yet combines our proven 3-way architecture with uncompromising components and craftsmanship. The SM-Series delivers unrivaled imaging, accuracy, and detail for the most critical applications..

The key to the SM-Series’ high performance is its 3-way coincident architecture. This design allows for the ultra-lifelike imaging of a coaxial speaker, while delivering the low distortion and midrange clarity that only a 3-way can achieve.

Not only are the midrange and tweeter coaxial, they are also coincident, meaning that they are physically time aligned and thus phase coherent from all angles.

The SM-Series speakers are acoustic point sources, and particular care has been given to the transition from the midrange to the baffle. This transition is seamless to the edge of the speaker, resulting in an engrossing stereo image where details are lifelike and crisp.

1-Inch Aluminum-Dome Tweeter

The SM-Series’ aluminum-dome tweeter delivers excellent dynamics, resulting in clear high frequency response without distortion. The tweeter uses a unique geometry to reduce high-Q ultrasonic resonances, eliminating harshness that can make metal tweeters fatiguing over time.

4-Inch Profile-Optimized Midrange

The SM-5-C’s midrange is optimized not only for its own frequency band, but also for its role as the tweeter’s waveguide. The shape is precision engineered for ideal directivity, and peak-to-peak excursion is limited to under 1mm to prevent intermodulation distortion.

Flux Stabilized Woofer

The SM-5-C’s woofer incorporates features that reduce magnetic flux modulation, bringing distortion down dramatically.

Paper is used for both the woofer and midrange cone material. Kali’s testing has shown that, despite its humble nature, paper is ideal in terms of stiffness, weight, and natural damping characteristics.

Amplification

The SM-5-C requires a power amplifier. Kali recommends bi-amplifying the speakers using an LEA amplifier with at least 100W per channel. For example, the LEA Connect 164 160W per channel 4-channel amplifier is the minimum choice for a pair of SM-5-Cs. Configuration files for LEA amplifiers can be found by clicking this link. Refer to the user’s manual for instructions for programming the LEA amplifier.

If you’d like to use a different amplifier, you’ll need to make sure that it can deliver 20VRMS into a 3 Ohm load. Most amplifiers rated for 100W at 4 Ohm should be sufficient, but you’ll need to verify that the amplifier you select is capable of handling a 3 Ohm load. The amplifier, or some other component after the amplifier in your signal chain, will need to include a peak limiter. Using the SM-5-Cs without a peak limiter will void your warranty.

Mounting

The SM–5-C features mounting holes on both the top and bottom of the loudspeaker. Kali recommends using a speaker specific U-bracket from Triad-Orbit, but any speaker mount with a 4.25 x 2-Inch bolt pattern that is capable of holding the SM-5-C’s 21 lbs weight will also work.