Having in proper Zen koan style paraphrased Laurence Dickie's Vivid Audio Giya speakers elsewhere as hornless horns, I'd call the Kawero Classic ultra-resolution Vandersteens. Either sketch points at a core quality even when such extreme condensation misses so much detail that detractors call it character assassination. But, great horns are ferociously dynamic and most direct. Voilà, the uncut Giya sound. It manages equivalent dynamics and speed with ultra low-mass glass-fibre/balsa enclosures and proprietary all-metal drivers. Vandersteens have always been warm speakers. Their resolving power simply increases as one ascends their range. Yet the central warmth never falters. Combining very high detail magnification with innate warmth—in current digital talk, the word is native—is also how the Classic does it. In that it was déjà vu all over again if you've heard the Chiara or read my review of it.

Sadly in audiophile chatrooms, 'warmth' is reflexively embedded in tube-based connotations. Rightly so, many of them are far from favourable. Hence warmth is bad. To give us a wide berth from unwanted and in this context not applicable meanings, let's pare back this warmth. It can come from limited treble bandwidth. Not here. This take on the superior Raal ribbon tweeter goes the other way with a vengeance. Then Goldmund's 3MHz circuitry banishes HF phase shift from its end. Warmth can come from too much 2nd-order distortion aka octave doubling. If you've heard Goldmund, Spectral or Bakoon direct-coupled amps, you'd know how that didn't apply. Warmth can be a by-product of painting with too dull or fat a tip. Things that should stay separate to properly individuate clump together. Not here. High resolution and cat litter don't live on the same sheet of music.

Warmth can be the product of distance where reflective sound dominates over direct sound. By definition, reflective sound is always late. It travels longer before reaching the ear. Civilians talk of echo which is far too delayed and extreme for our purposes but can nearly apply in churches for example. Studio lingo calls it reverb. Though it can be added artificially by software or with delay circuits, in real life reverb is simply room or venue sound. As that reflective contribution increases to overlay and envelop direct sound, warmth increases, sharp-edged separation decreases. Changing your seating from front row to the rafters of the balcony plays directly with these values. With this diffusive source of warmth, we've now arrived at the Classic. Recall its rear-firing drivers. Though lower frequencies will always wrap around the cabinet, the majority of this rear-aiminig output reflects off the front wall. With the ABR duplicating the frontal midrange's bandwidth which we already know to be unusually broad, we arrive at a quasi omni pattern. With too much distance from the front wall, the time delay between direct and reflected sound would fall outside the window in which our ear/brain sums the two. Then we distinguish between the two as original sound plus its shadow/echo. My setup was still too close to the front wall to create any discernable extra reverb. I had one sound, not two.

Too many speakers are designed with computer simulation software to prioritize linear frequency response in anechoic environs. That doesn't account for how a speaker actually behaves once it gets installed in a room. Do you know anyone who parks their high-end speaker in the back yard? Or at the end of a 10m pole to be in free air? No, boundary interactions are the playground of hifi loudspeakers. A good designer knows that. He accounts for it with great deliberation. The fact that compared to live sound, so many modern speakers sound painfully lean and harmonically threadbare suggests that their designers don't. Or perhaps they prize a different ideal of real sound. Since I couldn't compare Rainer's very heavy box to an OB version with the same drivers, we have to trust his claims for how effective the Panzerholz and labyrinth addresses are at combating common box issues. Those arise because acoustic energy trapped inside—the driver rear emissions as 50% of the total output produced—constantly fights against the structure. By simple triangulation to other speakers, I'm comfortable that the particular warmth I'm talking about wasn't the result of cabinet talk. Nor were warm and fuzzy electronics the cause. Having temporary loaner access to the Telos 360 monos which the designer himself endorses to the fullest, I felt reassured to experiencing his speakers in a very good light indeed. Hearing the Telos cubes on my own speakers, I'd already called them the amplifier equivalent of superior passive magnetic preamps à la Bent Audio/Vinnie Rossi, Audio Consulting, StereoKnight, MusicFirst & Co where autoformers or transformers handle attenuation. Knowing our room, I also knew what our usual speakers sound like in it to recognize where the Classic diverged.

Here then comes my reverb-delayed punch line. For various reasons hinted at above, audiophile perception views warmth as the enemy of resolution. When it's from box talk, insufficient bandwidth, noise, phase shift, high THD or all of it combined, that's a perfectly legitimate belief to nurse. When it's from strategic speaker radiation, it's time to get off that bottle. It's all fine and dandy to invoke recorded warmth by way of disputing the need or even justification for playing to room contributions. The typical argument is two-fold: a/ that such warmth wasn't recorded and thus must be shunned; b/ that it will differ from room to room to be entirely unpredictable and is to be avoided at all costs, too. As a theoretical diss, it's a peach of an argument. But consider the outcome. We already suffer from most unnatural recorded sound as a result of extreme close-mic'ing, multi-tracking, dynamic compression and more. That misery then adds itself to poor power response of in-room speaker behaviour. Combine the two and we face lean shallow insufficiently embodied tunes. Anyone familiar with the sound of real instruments and vocals recognizes a plain lack of cojones, guts and glory. So... would you rather preach idealist philosophy to win arguments? Or do you want to experience actual satisfaction?

That's the key question the Kaiser Kawero Classic asks and answers. You needn't agree with the thinking behind it to hear those results. You'll hear them from even the leanest, fasted most lucid electronics regardless. It's precisely why this warmth isn't due to the usual suspects of limitation. And it's why in this instance, warmth, very high resolution and terrific treble illumination can happily coexist without either/or shenanigans!