Vienna Acoustics THE KISS reference loudspeakers

PRICE REDUCED!!

Up for consideration is a pair of beautiful Vienna Acoustics "The Kiss" loudspeakers in Sapele and Piano black finish including optional stands. I am the original owner and purchased these speakers new in 2016 from an authorized Vienna Acoustic dealer. The speakers have been played sparingly and reside in a dedicated listening room free from pets, kids, smoke and direct sunlight. Speakers were always covered and have less than 150 hours of use. No visible scratches, scuffs or dings are noted. These speakers are in amazing condition and barely broken in.

From Vienna Acoustics website:

Visually stunning and entirely new, The Kiss loudspeaker system represents new state of art technology while also representing art itself. Only a speaker of such performance and beauty could justly pay respect to the most famous of the Gustav Klimt paintings, "Der Kuss".

Built around the same revolutionary coincident driver as the famed The Music, The Kiss represents a new level of performance from a stand mounted speaker. Mounted below the revolutionary coincident Flat-Spider-Cone driver combination is an all new 23cm our proprietary X3P Spider-Cone woofer. Even the visually stunning, unique new stand features technologies designed to not only look beautiful, but more importantly offer a stable and silent environment for The Kiss to operate in.

"To the age its art, to art its freedom"

With these few words elegantly crafted and prominently presented above the entry of the famous Secession located within Vienna's city center, the beginning of Jugendstil was begun in 1897. The Jugendstil was no dogmatic federation espousing artistic rights and wrongs; rather, this was a group of forward thinkers exploring new departures and destinations in creation. At their foundation was the urging of every persuasion including architecture, painting and music all combining together for the sake of progression. As the art movement's most significant contributor and father, Gustav Klimt has been forever immortalised into the art fabric that is Vienna. Passion, skill, innovation and harmony are all words that evoke Klimt and his art. It is with this foundation that The Klimt Series was born and presented here, our newest release paying homage to his masterpiece, Der Kuss.
Revolution - Form Follows Function

Following the introduction of the flagship of the The Klimt Series, The Music, we present the smaller, yet no compromise model, The Kiss. As its larger sibling, The Kiss is based on the same revolutionary and patented Flat-Spider-Cone coincident driver system. This new design is able to produce the Platonic ideal of the entire critical seven octave human vocal range and beyond in a single, phase coherent time plain without any of the normal horn loading and compression present in most conventional designs. Not only does this technical innovation free the sound of virtually all mechanical interference, it also allows for great placement freedom that is normally not experienced nor expected with a reference speaker system. As with art, time and space are not frozen into a predetermined static point. Instead, "To the age its art, to art its freedom."

Vienna Acoustics - The Art of Natural Sound

CABINET CRAFTSMANSHIP:

The cabinet's contribution to natural sound is of major importance; that's why Vienna Acoustics devote so much care and so many development resources to its construction.

At the same time, they want all cabinets to be uniquely attractive, not only because such technological effort and quality deserve to be accompanied by equally exceptional appearance, but also because, more than any other element in a music or film reproduction system, loudspeakers become a part of your lifestyle. Happily, a great deal of the beauty in the appearance of Vienna Acoustics speakers is inherent in a design crafted for perfect sound.

All of their designs feature carefully curved, narrow baffles. They're actually intended to minimise early reflections and edge diffraction, but at the same time they result in cool European design – this timeless and simple elegance is not only easy to integrate into your living room, but Vienna Acoustics speakers are in reality pieces of fine furniture of which you can be proud.

This is achieved by employing true furni­ture-grade materials and assembly techniques and hand­ finishing each cabinet to perfection. Vienna Acoustics utilise an exceptional veneer wrapping technique.

In reference to veneer: nothing can compare to the naturalness, warmth, and beauty of real wood. There's simply no way to replicate it with the artificial vinyl foils used on most speaker cabinets. Of course, PVC foils are cheap in terms of material; but also in terms of labour, as using this plastic does not require the intensive hand-lacquered finish that Vienna Acoustics execute in seven individual layers.

Only the high-grade, real wood veneer technique clearly reveals the beauty of the wood – wood is unique, it has a history, it is alive.

Vienna Acoustics select all of the veneer for their speakers themselves, visiting the various veneer dealers to personally ensure that they have collected only the prescribed, premium veneer-quality specimens for each of their finishes. For beech, it's the highest-grade quality: "Grade A Extra." For rosewood, in addition to requiring "Grade A Extra," the Vienna Acoustics team have a particular specification for the grain and contrast, which limits the usable veneer to 3% to 5% of all available. For ash, which is used for their black speakers, their specification pertains to the exact kind of grain required in connection with their clarity standards, and the deepness of the grain.

Vienna Acoustics veneer technique complements their real-wood joinery solutions and all their advantages to further enhance the character of Vienna Acoustics cabinets: exceptional beauty through great workmanship.

PATENTED FLAT COAXIAL TECHNOLOGY:

This patented flat spidercone technology is the latest revolutional step in Vienna Acoustics steady sound development and progress. Being in all of their Reference speakers of the KLIMT Series.

It was a technology that Peter Gansterer had been thinking about and working on for a long time. It was years of Peter's work that produced a driver that used a revolutionary flat cone. It was that lightweight cone, with the best mass-stiffness ratio in the industry, that led to “THE MUSIC’s” truly remarkable sound.

This driver is created from a compound of several thermal plastic polymers as well as added glass fibres. This material composition offers both a considerable stiffness to mass ratio while also possessing the self silencing necessary to ensure a lack of colouration in sound reproduction. That is, the cone material itself is virtually silent eliminating the need for notch type filters in the cross-over. The goal is to eliminate the problem of cone resonances before they begin. Added to the special material composition is the new flat design which further removes the sonic signature of the driver by eliminating the cone diffraction of the cone walls most often referred to as horn-loading. It is through the process of concentrating on both physical construction or forming and with special quiet materials that Vienna Acoustics are able to achieve this new level of performance that is free of the normal mechanical limitations as well as resonances present in most conventional midrange cone designs.

In addition to this entirely new flat midrange driver, Vienna Acoustic's have installed a special, hand crafted silk dome tweeter in its middle or pole location. Doing so allows for a timing or phase correctness that cannot otherwise be achieved. Ultimately their final complete coincident driver pairing is capable of reproducing the entire human vocal range, and beyond, without any cross-over interference particularly within the most critical human vocal range. The end result is a system that takes on a presence which until now has only been available in compact monitors. A further advantage of this design is the mentioned timing or phase correctness of the overall combination. The complete assembly results in a dispersion characteristic that creates much more of a “sweet area” versus the typical “sweet spot” found in most designs. For this reason Vienna Acoustics prefer to describe this entire assembly as the Music Centre.

PATENTED SPIDERCONE TECHNOLOGY:

During the development of BEETHOVEN, Vienna Acoustics could not find a convincing bass driver on the market that met their demands. They identified the driver cone to be the weak link, so they designed their own, which is innovative in terms of both material and shape: the Vienna Acoustics "spider cone."

Not only developed in, but also produced near, Vienna, spider cones constitute a significant breakthrough in performance. Never before have we heard drivers of this size (7") produce such prodigious bass response. Their unbelievable stiffness has been achieved by designing axial and radial reinfor­cement ribs that cover the cone like a spider web. The precise size, number, and location of these stiffening elements was derived through computerised Finite Element Analysis. Production by injection moulding demanded an expensive tool, but it pays: these cones move as a perfect piston, achieving the ultimate goal.

The same efforts went into finding the right composition material. Extensive testing revealed that a mixture of TPX and a specially determined, smaller amount of polypropylene is ideal, giving the stiff cone high inner self-damping, while silencing secondary vibrations. TPX features high stiffness, combined with very high inner damping. Excellent resistance to heat (melting point 240 degrees Celsius), which is especially important for bass drivers, because at the voice coil neck (where the cone is fixed to the voice coil) high temperatures commonly arise. TPX also exhibits the lowest specific weight of all available thermoplastic. The end result is a bass driver with a sound quality that is both richly detai­led and remarkably extended, even into the lowest bass ranges.

In most Vienna Acoustics models you'll find optically transparent cones made of a special mixture, which is very similar to the one just described. Vienna Acoustics named this new material XPP, and they believe it sets a milestone for naturalness in reproduction. It combines the precision and transparency of hard cones (such as stamped metal) with the smoothness and musicality of sof­ter materials. One of XPP's secrets is the right share of polypropylene (featuring very high inner damping among other advantages), which produces the optimum in stiffness and inner damping ratio. This is the basis for a driver that is dedicated to meet the challenges of a two-way system, which has to combine accurate, powerful bass with delicate and natural mid-range frequencies. When used with properly designed crossovers that feature a very gentle slope, these cones are capable of rendering music with great power and precision, yet also provide a very relaxed and enjoyable music experience.


DEEP BASS FROM SMALL ENCLOSURES:

Bass performance is determined by the parameters of the driver, the crossover, the volume of the cabinet, and, if it is not a closed cabinet, the system of cabinet support for the woofer (for example, bass reflex, horn-loading, transmission line, and so on). Throughout their years of experience, we've noted the superiority of the Helmholtz resonator (known as bass reflex) compared to the other systems, if all influences are exerted according to an exact methodology. A perfectly tuned bass-reflex system with complementary designed drivers not only enables fast, solid bass foundation and slam; interestingly, it also affects the midrange, allowing the driver to breathe and sounding more natural and more free, compared to a closed cabinet.

Specifications:

System Type 3-way stand-mounted system
Frequence Response 38Hz - 20kHz
Bass Driver 23cm Patented Vienna Acoustics Spider-Cone
Midrange - Tweeter Coincident 18cm

Patented Vienna Acoustics Flat-Spider-Cone midrange with 2.5cm hand crafted neodymium centre vented silk dome tweeter

Sensitivity 89db
Impedance 4 Ohm
Recommended Power 50 - 180 watts
Speaker Weight 43kg/95lbs each
Speaker Dimensions (WxHxD) 273mm/10.75" x 540mm/21.3" x 540mm/21.3" each
Stand Weight 23kg/50lbs each
Stand Dimensions (WxHxD) 273mm/10.75" x 730mm/29" x 530mm/21"(including spikes) each

Speakers are being sold well below my purchase price in 2016 and so my loss is your gain. Don't be fooled by the size of the speakers. They sit just over 4-feet tall and weigh 145lbs each. The bass is stunning and the soundstage is massive. Speakers simply disappear in the room. There are several rave reviews online. I have the original shipping containers, manual, spikes, etc. These loudspeakers are a work of art and simply the most beautiful speakers on the market today. Retail price for speakers and stands are $20,696 per Bluebird Music US distributor. 

All reasonable offers will be considered. Local buyer will receive a price discount if picked up at my residence. Thanks for looking.