KLH Model Five (1968)
The KLH Model Five is one of the most historically significant speakers KLH ever made, and one of the most thinly documented when it comes to hard specifications. The record does agree on the basics. It was a compact two-way bookshelf speaker with an 8-inch woofer in an acoustic suspension cabinet, and it sold in remarkable numbers. The VTA Archive calls it "one of the best-selling hi-fi speakers of its era" and, in a separate passage, "one of the best-selling hi-fi speakers of all time." Its affordability and performance, the archive notes, made high-fidelity audio accessible to a generation of listeners.
The archive's own timeline disagrees with itself. One paragraph places the Model Five's introduction in 1960, while another labels it "Model Five (1968)." No source resolves this cleanly, so treat the earlier date with caution.
What's genuinely known about the vintage Model Five's performance is thin but telling: the acoustic suspension design offered "surprising bass extension and clarity for its size." That's the extent of the documented sonic characterization. No frequency response, impedance, sensitivity, dimensions, or weight figures survive in the sources I've found for the original. (The Model Six specs — 45 Hz–20 kHz, 108 dB — sometimes get attached to the Five, but those belong to the Six, not this model.)
The Model Five's story has a second chapter. KLH, after decades of ownership changes and dormancy, was revived in 2017, and in the spring of 2021 the company re-issued the Model Five as a modern floor-standing, three-way speaker. This reissue is a different beast entirely: a 10-inch woofer, a dedicated 4-inch midrange, and a 1-inch tweeter, with crossover points at 380 Hz and 2850 Hz (both second-order). It's priced around $1,250–$1,650 depending on finish, with options including walnut, mahogany, West African Mahogany, and Nordic Noir. The modern version's sensitivity is a point of conflict in the record — figures of 87.5 dB, 85.93 dB, and 90.5 dB all appear — so I'll simply note that the manufacturer claims 87.5 dB (2.83V/m) and leave it at that. SoundStage! Hi-Fi observed that this sensitivity figure, if accurate, is reasonably high for an acoustic-suspension design given the quoted 42 Hz–20 kHz (±3 dB) response and 32 Hz low-frequency extension at −10 dB.
The documentation for the vintage Model Five is thin.
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