Kali Audio's finest speaker combines our proven 3-way architecture with uncompromising components and craftsmanship. The SM series offers unrivaled imaging, accuracy and detail for the most critical applications.
Kali's founding principle is to offer the best possible product for its price. Our speakers have always been praised for their accuracy, translation and ease of use. The SM series is based on these ideals and incorporates the best available materials, components and construction.
The result is high-performance studio monitors that are ready for the most demanding mixing and mastering applications.
The key to the high performance of the SM series is the 3-way coincident architecture. This design allows for the extremely vivid imaging of a coaxial speaker, while delivering the low distortion and mid-range clarity that can only be achieved with 3-ways.
Not only are the midrange and tweeter coaxial, but they are also coincident, meaning they are naturally time-aligned and therefore phase coherent from all angles.
The SM series speakers are acoustic point sources and special attention has been paid to the transition from mid to diaphragm. This transition is seamless at the edge of the speaker, resulting in a compelling stereo image where details are vivid and sharp.
1-inch aluminum-dome tweeter
The SM series aluminum dome tweeter offers excellent dynamics, resulting in a clear high frequency response without distortion. The tweeter uses a unique geometry to reduce high-Q ultrasonic resonances, eliminating the harshness that can cause metal tweeters to fatigue over time.
4 inch-Optimized Midrange
The SM-5-C's midrange has been optimized not only for its own frequency band, but also for its role as a tweeter waveguide. The shape is precisely designed for ideal directivity, and peak-to-peak offset is limited to less than 1mm to avoid intramodulation distortion.
Flux Stabilized Woofer
The SM-5-C's woofer incorporates features that reduce magnetic flux modulation, dramatically reducing distortion.
Paper is used for both the woofer and midrange cone material. Kali's testing showed that, despite its humble nature, the paper is ideal in terms of stiffness, weight and physical damping characteristics.
Crossover Network
A top-tier speaker deserves top-tier internals, and the crossover network in the Santa Monica passive speakers is as good as they come.
Since the SM-5-C uses amplifier tuning to handle frequency response optimization, the crossover network can be optimized purely for use in directivity switching. This level of optimization allows the use of high-quality components, including ultra-low dispersion polypropylene capacitors, air-core inductors, and ultra-low-inductance resistors.
The crossover network is fully optimized for bi-wire use (LF+MR/HF), but care has also been taken to allow single-wire use.
Low-diffraction Baffle
The baffle around the midrange follows the shape of this driver, blending seamlessly from the edge of the driver into the rest of the speaker cabinet. This eliminates on-axis diffraction artifacts in the frequency response and helps to enhance the excellent imaging characteristics of the SM series.
Low-noise Port Tube
Like all Kali speakers, the SM-5-C uses a dynamic flow-derived port tube for high performance and low noise.
In most port tubes, air leaves at different speeds from different parts of the opening, creating noisy turbulence. This turbulence can be heard as a "whoosh" or an audible sound of air coming from the system. This sound will add to the noise floor and hide the low end details.
The port tube on the SM-5-C was designed to ensure that all air leaves the port tube at the same speed. This helps to increase the subwoofer's low-end response while keeping the bass clear, tight and free of extra noise.
