KLH Model 10
A compact full-range speaker that stands barely wider than a floorboard and still manages to sound bigger than its footprint.
Overview
At roughly 23 inches tall but only about 1¾ inches wide and 8¾ inches deep, the KLH Model 10 is a strange-looking thing by any conventional standard — a tall, shallow column meant to slip into a room rather than dominate it. High Fidelity (October 1963, p.116) treated the Model 10 and its sibling Model 14 together as full-range speaker systems, noting that each took its own approach to squeezing high-fidelity response into compact dimensions. That framing is the key to understanding the 10: it is a speaker designed around the problem of fitting a full-range system into a space where a conventional box would never be tolerated.
The same High Fidelity review (October 1963, p.116) reported that the Model 10 had a smooth white-noise pattern, which the reviewer read as an indicator of very low distortion. That is a meaningful data point for anyone who has spent time with small speakers of the era — a ragged noise response usually signals resonances and peaks that will show up as coloration on real program material. A clean noise pattern suggests the driver and enclosure were behaving themselves. In listening, the reviewer found the Model 10 sounded less "boxy" than some systems costing more, and credited it with an astonishing amount of impact given its size.
The "less boxy" observation is worth dwelling on, because it is exactly the complaint that killed most compact speakers of the period. Narrow cabinets and small internal volumes tend to produce a cupped, hollow quality in the lower midrange, and the Model 10 apparently sidestepped much of that. Whether the credit belongs to the driver, the enclosure proportions, or both is not documented in the available material, but the result as heard by the reviewer was a compact speaker that did not announce its compromises.
HiFi-Stereo (January 1962, p.34) also covered the Model 10 in its technical pages, in a discussion of how room size, furnishings, speaker placement, and microphone position all affect measured frequency response — and why anechoic testing became the standard way to isolate a speaker's own behavior from the room around it. The Model 10's appearance in that context confirms it was a speaker the measurement-oriented press took seriously enough to test, not a decorative afterthought.
What the available documentation does not settle is the rest of the story: production years, original price, driver complement, crossover details, impedance, sensitivity, and the specific cabinet materials are all absent from the record here. Collectors chasing a pair should treat those as open questions to confirm against the unit in hand rather than assumptions. What is documented — the dimensions, the compact full-range design intent, the clean noise response, and the reviewer's impression of impact and freedom from boxiness — is enough to explain why the Model 10 has stayed interesting to people who care about small speakers that punch above their size.
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