Vince Bruzzezzi was showing off the flagship Totem Acoustic Metal loudspeakers, but when I went over to say “hello”, it was off to the Kin Mini ($500/pair) that he dragged me.
He jokingly referred to the pair of rather plainly turned-out mini-monitors as “the anti-sound bar”, taking a jab at the latest “growth segment” in loudspeaker design.
The Kin Mini are rather weird – they’re tiny, they’re designed to work well on a credenza-top and even though they’re rear-ported, the can happily be jammed up against a wall. They’re also made to be run wide-open – Vince says there’s no breakup mode, no blatty-blatterstein when tunes or TV takes a sudden dive. The cones are made from MHEX, which he said was stiffer than Kevlar or carbon fiber. There are no resistors and only a single cap. Frequency range is 100Hz to 40kHz.
The demo I heard had them paired with a $700 Kin subwoofer (a Kin Mini-Sub is coming in July at $500), and when he randomly queued up Chris Jones’ “No Sanctuary Here”, I nearly choked. There are tower speakers that can’t do what these little suckers were doing, right there on the tabletop. It was really good.
Best part of the demo? When Vince picked them up, spun them ‘round and plopped them back down, but facing backwards. And even then, they still imaged pretty freakin’ well. What the hell.
A matching, sealed, center-channel (in a mid-tweet-mid configuration) will be coming by September.
