An amplifier engineer turns to loudspeakers.

Kii Audio is a young company by hi-fi standards. The German commercial register shows Kii Audio GmbH entered at the Cologne district court on 4 November 2014, with Christian “Chris” Reichardt as managing director and a stated purpose of designing, developing, making and marketing high-quality loudspeaker systems, according to the company-data service North Data. The company’s own website says it was founded in 2014, and the German magazine LowBeats has dated the launch of its first product, the Kii THREE, to 2015.

Its best-known founder is the Belgian engineer Bruno Putzeys, now its chief technology officer. English Wikipedia says he was born in Brussels in 1973 and spent ten years at the Philips Applied Technologies lab in Leuven, where he invented the “UcD” class-D amplifier circuit, before leaving in 2005 to divide his time between Grimm Audio and Hypex. In 2014, it says, he left Hypex and co-founded Kii Audio, and in the same year co-founded Purifi Audio with Lars Risbo and Peter Lyngdorf. Kii’s website credits him with the UcD and Ncore amplifier designs and with the Grimm Audio LS1 loudspeaker of 2010, and says that with Kii he “turned his full attention to loudspeakers.”

Putzeys did not start the company alone. Kii’s website names Bart van der Laan, its chief operating officer and an embedded-software and signal-processing engineer, as a co-founder, and describes Reichardt, the chief executive, as a former guitar and music-theory teacher who worked for Digidesign/Avid, TC Electronic, SSL and Grimm Audio before setting up his own distribution company in the late 1990s. The German magazine fairaudio has also described Reichardt, and Wim Weijers, who handles international sales, as co-founders.

Active Wave Focusing.

The Kii THREE set out the company’s approach. It is a compact active loudspeaker, 20 centimetres wide, 40 high and 40 deep, with six drivers — four 6.5-inch woofers, a 5-inch midrange and a 1-inch tweeter — each driven by its own 250-watt class-D amplifier and controlled by a digital signal processor, the company says. Kii calls the result “Active Wave Focusing”: the processor shapes a cardioid, or forward-directed, dispersion pattern from 40 Hz upwards, so that less bass reaches the wall behind the speaker, and time-aligns the drivers. The speaker also contains its own digital-to-analogue converter, so it needs only a source. LowBeats reported in 2018 that the amplifiers are Ncore class-D designs.

Because its speakers run on Kii’s own processing and firmware, the company says, it has extended the range with new products and software updates rather than replacing the THREE with a “Mark II.” The Kii CONTROL, a controller and digital preamplifier connected by a single network cable, adds digital inputs and volume control inside the speakers’ processor. The BXT bass extension, shown at the hifideluxe show in May 2018, turns the THREE into a floorstanding speaker; LowBeats reported eight woofers and 2,000 watts per module, and a price of €14,995 a pair for the modules in white. Kii describes the combined system as a line source with horizontal directivity control.

In October 2023 Kii announced the Kii SEVEN, a smaller all-in-one speaker with streaming, Dante networking and multiroom control for up to twelve speakers, at €7,590 a pair, LowBeats reported. The company quotes 600 watts per speaker for the SEVEN, against 1,500 watts for the THREE and 3,500 watts for the THREE with BXT. Kii says its speakers suit homes, professional studios and custom installations, and its website lists awards and reviews for the THREE, including The EAR’s Best of 2018.

German active speakers.

Germany’s high-end loudspeaker makers do not share a single school. Some build on horns, some rethink the driver itself, and some put the amplifiers inside the cabinet and let electronics correct for the box and the room. The seven brands in this guide cover all three approaches, and the electronics that drive them.

Avantgarde Acoustic, at Lautertal in the Odenwald hills of Hesse, builds its range around horn loudspeakers, according to its website. Manger took a different route: its company timeline says Josef W. Manger filed his first patent in 1968 for what became a bending-wave transducer, the Manger Schallwandler, and that small-series production began in Mellrichstadt, in northern Bavaria, in 1990.

Active designs are the third strand. Backes & Müller, in Saarbrücken, marks fifty years of active, sensor-controlled loudspeakers on its website. Kii Audio, registered in Bergisch Gladbach near Cologne and building its speakers at Hamminkeln, near Wesel, sells active speakers with what it calls cardioid technology, meant to cut reflections from the room. Lyravox, in Hamburg, gives each driver its own amplifier and uses a digital signal processor in place of a passive crossover.

The electronics makers have roots in the Ruhr. Einstein Audio Components is registered in Bochum, and Audionet’s legal notice gave a Bochum address in 2015 and a Berlin one by 2018, according to archived versions of its website; the brand now belongs to audionet GmbH, registered in Berlin.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Built by hand on the Lower Rhine.

The company has moved as it has grown. Its imprint today gives Kii Audio GmbH’s address as Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne, while its terms of sale name Wermelskirchen and its contact address is Uhlandsweg 6b in Hamminkeln-Dingden, on the Lower Rhine near Wesel. fairaudio, which visited in May 2022, reported that Kii had first built speakers in two small rooms, that its new production building in Hamminkeln had been ready since the summer of 2021, and that it then sold in 40 countries with a team of 15.

That report is the most detailed independent account of where the speakers are made. The cast polyurethane cabinet blanks for the THREE come from a supplier in the Black Forest, fairaudio reported, and amplifier modules, wiring and drivers are fitted by hand in Hamminkeln, where each speaker is measured and pairs are matched to within ±0.3 dB; the magazine added that Kii had switched early to German and European components. Kii itself says that all its technologies are designed in-house. Its ownership is not public in the sources we checked: North Data lists five shareholders but names them only to subscribers.

The brand’s visual language is restrained. Kii offers the THREE in twelve colours, and fairaudio saw exclusive finishes in Hamminkeln including Phoenix Orange Metallic, Nardo Grey and Spring Green; the SEVEN comes in Fine Touch White and Fine Touch Dark Grey. A word-and-figurative mark, “kii,” was published in 2020, according to North Data, but the company publishes no colour or type specification.

For a design guide, Kii Audio shows how a loudspeaker brand can be built on software as much as on cabinets. Compare Backes & Müller, a much older German maker of regulated active speakers, and Nubert, another German loudspeaker maker. For this guide we use graphite, white and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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