KLH Model Five (Speakers)
A Cambridge bookshelf that turns up in the strangest places — including a reader's letter to Audio magazine in 1974.
Overview
The paper trail on the KLH Model Five is thin, and the archive won't pretend otherwise. The most concrete thing that survives about this speaker is not a spec sheet at all — it's a mention in Audio (January 1975, p.50), where KLH Research & Development appears in the magazine's advertising index. That's the whole document. One owner, one system, one model number written without ceremony next to a Dynaco amp. It tells you the Five was the kind of speaker a serious hobbyist paired with kit-built amplification and expected to hold its own — and it tells you almost nothing else.
What the archive can confirm is the name. The vintage Five is the one that shows up in period system listings and in KLH's own magazine pages of the mid-1970s. Anything beyond that is inference, and this page will not dress inference up as fact.
The fact sheet for this model is empty of driver complement, impedance, sensitivity, dimensions, price, and production years, so any number quoted elsewhere — including numbers that circulate on forum threads — should be treated as unverified until someone produces the original KLH literature.
The reception record is equally sparse. A 1979 buyer's guide from HI-Fi-Stereo-Buyers (September 1979, p.51) covers the KLH 3 and its excursion-controlling computer circuitry in the same issue, which confirms the brand was still being reviewed and advertised in the late 1970s — but it says nothing about the Five specifically. That gap matters. It means the Five's reputation today rests largely on the fact that people kept them, not on a documented review consensus. When a speaker survives forty-plus years in enough numbers to still appear on the used market, that's its own kind of review. It just isn't the kind you can footnote.
What the archive can say with confidence is narrower and more useful: the Model Five is a KLH speaker of the 1970s, it was sold alongside the company's other Research & Development products, and at least one documented owner ran it with a Dynaco Stereo 120 — a pairing that suggests the Five was not a hard-to-drive oddity and did not require exotic amplification to make music. Beyond that, the honest answer is that the archive needs the original owner's manual, a period review, or a KLH catalog page before it can say more. If you own one and have the paperwork, the feedback link at the bottom of this page exists for exactly that reason.
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