Kali Audio IN-8 £699

The IN-8s are new speakers from a company which have already taken the studio world by storm, offering both great value and great results

You may not have heard of Kali Audio and you can be forgiven. This Californian company have only been around for a couple of years but with their LP range of monitors, offer an incredibly detailed listening experience for silly money – the Holy Grail of studio monitoring, basically. The LP range is named after Lone Pine, a charming-sounding town near the Kali Audio base and these new IN speakers maintain that wonderful ethos, named after Independence, a town that is ‘one up’ from Lone Pine on the map. They also share the components, drivers and technology used in the LP speakers, so will they make as big an impact?

IN depth

The LP range of speakers are two-way, meaning that they have just a woofer and tweeter to cover your bass and treble needs. The IN range are ‘one up’ on the map and one up with drivers, adding a third mid to join the dots between the same woofer and tweeter and home in on the mid range. Interestingly this 4-inch mid driver is placed coaxially around the 1-inch tweeter, rather than in between the woofer and tweeter as you’d find on most traditional 3-way speakers. This design, say Kali, delivers a “stereo soundstage that presents the listener with a hyper-realistic level of detail. The soundstage that you hear will have every detail that’s present in the mix”.

That, dear readers, is monitoring in a couple of sentences. You want to hear all the detail, even the mistakes; in fact especially the mistakes so that you can correct them.