Kenwood KFC-PS1700P

14th December 2007 Adam Rayner

A two-way component speaker system with separate tweeter units, midbass drivers and passive crossovers. Complete with a mounting kit to fit the tweeters in surface or flush applications as well as screws and fixings. The tweeters have short lengths of wire attached but the set otherwise supplies no cables. The box they come in is printed in detail and has templates perforated into it for use in mounting the speakers.
The passive crossovers offer a 0dB, -2dB or -4dB setting of attenuation, so there are two levels of resistors you can include in the circuit if you find your HF too brash. The tweeters can be pointed slightly within their housings, eyeball style to improve their direction of aim.
– Power Handling 55w RMS
– Sensitivity 92dB 1w/1M
– Own Pink noise test figure 115.6dB (Vol @20 @ trk 9 dB Drag Vol III)
– Passband 35Hz to 30kHz
– Tweeter diameter 25mm
– Tweeter Mounting Depth 23mm
– Midbass Mounting Depth 53mm
– Cone: Carbon-Polypropylene hybrid
– Tweeter: Tetron dome with Neodymium magnet
– Crossover slope & point: 12dB per octave @ 3.2kHz Zobel network
– Chassis: Aluminium die-cast
– Complete with: Surface or flush mount tweeter kit, perforated card templates (on box) grilles and fixings
Review by Adam Rayner
I do enjoy the posh end of Japanese equipment. The packaging is very busy and printed with a lot of detail about whatï¿½s inside as well as including a perforated card mounting template. When you open it up, it is a mass of bits and bobs and arrives with the usual stuff but unusually no wire as I reckon Kenwood realise youï¿½ll want to use the good stuff and yet they canï¿½t put it in on the price. (Interestingly, Kicker supplied loads of really thick wire but theirs was a kit in a case like the JBL set.) The tweeters, like most here are equipped with simple lead-out wires rather than having terminals and the excellent multi-language sheet really is idiot-proof as to letting you know what wire colour is which and even includes advice about running tweeters out of phase unless they are very close to their midbass drivers.
The lugs on the midbass drivers are gold plated and well anchored and the badges that go on the grilles are supplied as part of the little baggie of bits so you can install them last of all and make sure they stay pristine.
The sound had authority with a degree of bass power and a slice of decent clarity to the midband. The tweeters could get a bit harsh when driven with large power and so these are more about sound than hooliganism levels of it. That said, these were in the absolute top echelon of efficiency for turning the watts into music. With the mic in the same place, the same test track played at the same volume for all the sets, the lowest score on the AudioControl SA-3055 RTA/SPL meter was 112.2dB and the highest a ridiculous 116.7 (Fusion) but these also got a ten for efficiency with 115.6dB. That means that on a mere 4 x 50w headunit amp, these will sound wonderful yet will still cope if you add an amplifier. Wide application window product.
Overall 8.4
Sound Quality 7
Build Quality 9
Power Handling 8
Efficiency 10
Value For Money 8