Taking up the baton after such a devastating blow was Kee Whatmough's challenge which, to her credit, she tackled head on in a most courageous manner. Colin's long-time wife and business partner, Kee has fearlessly expanded the company to include a retail arm in a new multi-studio well-located showroom in Melbourne while escalating manufacturing by taking Colin's ambitious last design, the Progeny, into production. It's worth mentioning at this point too that Kee has taken the initiative to engage a design team. Moving forward, these engineers—armed with meticulous design notes and detailed records—have been instructed to take up Colin's work in the same spirit to sustainably turn out future products which will continue the company's 'house' sound.

The descendants. The Progeny is a large 4-way semi-active design (3-way passive plus active sub-bass driver) featuring high-quality drive units specifically chosen by Colin Whatmough for their given tasks. Unlike the company's lower-rung offerings, the Progeny's extremely solid 86kg thoroughly braced cabinet is fully built in Australia. The quality of finish in my review sample was very high and came in a bright red automotive paint with gold flecks. Whatmough offer a multitude of paint and veneered finishes (and combinations of both) which are available upon request.

The driver configuration features the highly regarded flagship ScanSpeak Ring Radiator tweeter colloquially known as the nipple tweeter. In the right context, this tweeter is capable of superb detail retrieval and dynamic contrast. Colin Whatmough had a distinct liking for the Focal 4-inch Polyglass midrange driver as used in his statement model Paragon which is continued in the smaller sibling Progeny. The extremely low cone mass of a quoted 4 grams allows excellent transient response while the driver is valued also for its tonal accuracy and superb resolution qualities. A 6-inch proprietary mid-bass driver completes the on-baffle configuration and is said to be extremely responsive, a plausible product of its double magnet motor and large 33mm high temperature voice coil. Finally, a high power 10-inch lower-bass driver is used in the lower section of the cabinet in its own isolated enclosure. The 36mm Xmax 10-inch driver features a 3-inch high temperature voice coil and is driven via a dedicated 240 watts RMS class A/B amplifier with toroidal transformer. Internal wiring throughout is Cardas.

As per usual practice in a Colin Whatmough design, extreme care was taken in the design of the crossovers. Built-in crossover networks control the passive portion of the speaker whilst a separate neatly-built 1RU chassis houses the crossover for the sub section. Whatmough offers both single-ended RCA and XLR as time-of-purchase options. The unit basically interfaces between your preamplifier and power amplifier and hook-up is dead easy. Your preamplifier's outputs connect to the inputs of the outboard crossover while its outputs hook back into your existing system's amplifier which then powers the passive portion of the speaker. Whatmough provide a set of high-quality Cardas woofer cables which feed the lows from the outboard crossover to the speakers' in-built plate amp inputs. Further, the passive section of the Progeny is tri-wirable via Cardas silver-plated and Rhodium-coated solid copper binding posts. Alternatively you may triamp. This last is trickier unless you own identical amplifiers or at least, amplifiers with identical gain structures. Lastly about its hardware, the Progeny's bottom plate comes fitted with a solid steel outrigger. Provided are the largest spikes I've ever come across which in turn screw through the outrigger's bore holes. Smartly, the spikes can be adjusted from above via a round turn handle.

The Progeny's frequency response specifications of 25Hz to 40kHz (+/-3dB) reflect substantial internal cabinet volume, overall quality of engineering and, of course, the dedicated high power sub-bass driver. The quoted impedance is a nominal 8Ω while the claimed sensitivity is 89dB with an input level of 2.83V at 1 watt into 8Ω. The Progeny is friendly to a wide selection of valve or solid-state amplification of moderate power but as you'll gather as you read on, the better the amplification, the more you'll reap from these extremely accurate yet musical speakers. Whatmough suggests between 40 and 230 watts. Whatmough Loudspeakers provide a five year warranty for the Progeny.