Kerr Acoustic Open Day at Cultured Audio
I was invited by the UK distributor Symphony Distribution and Cultured Audio to a two-day event being held at their Oxfordshire-based demo rooms. Set in the small village of Whitney, this dealership has a beautiful location and stunning premises, including three demo rooms to showcase the latest and greatest in the world of high-end audio.
I travelled up on the Thursday afternoon via train from Paddington to Oxford station, and Dan from Symphony Distribution kindly picked me up and we went to the hotel where I was going to stay for one night before the open day started. Of course, it would have been rude if we did not try out some of the local pubs and cuisine in the surrounding areas, and Mike and Mark, the owners of Cultured Audio, knew the perfect places to take us. We started drinking in the hotel at first and then moved on to a pub where its specialty was pies, and OMG, I was not expecting it to be as good as it was, but the food was delicious. I just had to post about how good this food was, and so was the hospitality from all of the guys, Kerr Acoustics, Symphony Distribution, and Cultured Audio, as they really did look after me well. Massive thanks to them all!
Anyway, back to business and the open day, which was starting at 1pm on Friday, 24th April, and Saturday, 25th April, although I was only staying for Friday, which was long enough for me to take in all the brilliant systems at the beautiful premises of Cultured Audio. Arriving at 10:30am gave me plenty of time to get lots of content for my social media channels and to also take in the beautiful systems before customers of Cultured Audio started to arrive. As you walk into the shop, you are greeted with lots of vinyl and music to look at, which I think is a great starting point for any HiFi shop, as without music, there is no HiFi. There is also an array of other speakers and headphones for customers to look at, as well as a giant OLED screen with music and videos playing, creating a great ambience for customers coming into the shop.
The Main Demo Room and System 1
The main demo room really was the star of the show, as they say, with Kerr Acoustic's big K200 speakers, which looked absolutely stunning in the beautiful wood finish. They feature a 250mm bass driver, 75mm dome midrange driver, and a 60mm true ribbon tweeter, which weigh in at a hefty 43 Kg per speaker. They really are beasts to look at, with the imposing bass driver and the Radial-designed drive units, which look absolutely stunning in the beautifully finished cabinets. The K200s were partnered with Esoteric electronics, which gives 30 watts of Class A bliss, and a Vertere MG1 turntable; all the cables were from the New Zealand brand Montaudio, which I know well as I have reviewed one of their cable looms. I also reviewed the stunning Manuka HiFi rack, which can be viewed HERE, it was supporting the Esoteric electronics and Vertere turntable. What I also love about the K200 speakers and Kerr Acoustic speakers is that they use the brilliant Townshend Audio Seismic Podiums, which support their speakers and isolate them perfectly for pure performance. Having owned a pair of seismic podiums from Townshend and having reviewed a pair, I know exactly why Jes has chosen this superb partnership, as they isolate the speakers perfectly.
Where do I start with performance, well this is most certainly a world-class system which is extremely high-end but in the grand scheme of things an absolute bargain when you consider how much performance this system achieves with an approx price tag of £60,000 it can certainly show a thing or two to other systems costing considerably more. When sitting in the sweet spot towards the rear of the room, the amount of bass and the quality of bass was simply incredible from those big 10” drivers; they really did shift the air with plenty of slam, and you could feel the energy in the room, they energised it with absolute ease. I do love ribbon tweeters as they seem to be able to present such an airy and precise image with so much detail in front of you. Having had experience with dome midrange drivers from ATC, the K200s provide similar performance with such a lush midrange thanks to that dome drive unit. The detail and imaging on all the music played was sublime, which I loved. I listened to quite a bit of music on the system before people arrived for the open day, and got to listen to some of my favourite tracks, and the system did not disappoint one bit, as everything I heard sounded so good.
Demo Room 2 Upstairs and System 2
The next room at Cultured Audio was upstairs and featured the fantastic Kerr Acoustic K320 speakers, which were powered by Linn, and having heard them previously at the Bristol HiFi show, this environment was so much better as it features plenty of room acoustic treatments and allows the speakers to perform without hindrance. As with all of Jes speakers they feature the transmission line design which manage to give prodigious amounts of bass from what is still a two way floorstander and the bass performance was punchy, deep and tight with plenty of it, the imaging was also excellent with a deep and wide soundstage presented in front of me. I love the ribbon tweeter's performance as it just sounds so natural, but allows the sound to have that sparkle that is missing with normal silk dome tweeters.
Demo Room 3 Upstairs and System 3
Now this was such a beautiful sounding system and features Kerr Acoustic's smallest speakers, the K300s, which I have heard before on several occasions, but again, it was at HiFi shows, so not the greatest of environments. The demo room is beautifully furnished and treated like all the demo rooms at Cultured Audio, so it allows the speakers to perform at their best. The K300s were presented in this stunning colour, which is the Aston Martin racing green, and visually, they looked absolutely gorgeous; the colour just popped visually, and everyone who was there commented on how nice they looked. Powering the K300s was a Naim Audio electronics preamp/streamer and stereo power amplifier. I am a huge fan of what Naim Audio does, having owned a few of their products over the years, and they powered the K300s easily with great dynamics and sound.
Listening to these speakers in a treated room really showed what they could do as I listened to Geoff Castalelluci's The Sound Of Silence, his voice is deep and the bass extension from this transmission line speaker was seriously impressive with deep and extended bass that sounded sublime, the ribbon tweeter had such an airy sound which seemed to hang in front of us as the music was played and imaging was so precise with a beautiful soundstage presented in front of me. Jes also played Kraftwerk Elektro Kardiogramm, which had some superb punchy bass, and those 6.5" cones moved the air with considerable ease; the super-fast transient shifts were impressive from these smaller standmounts. I am hoping to get a pair of these in for review here at The Speaker Shack, so watch this space for more content from these star standmounts from Kerr Acoustic.
This open day was a fantastic event to get to listen to the beautiful range of speakers that Kerr Acoustic has in their product line, and Jes Kerr is one seriously talented speaker designer, and overall, such a great guy to be around and talk to about speakers and music in general.
Cultured Audio has such a wonderful demo facility with rooms that have all been designed to offer the very best in high-end audio, and with the main demo room, which has just been refurbished, it really is such a beautiful space and room to listen to music in. I love the back wall. Which has the wooden sound diffuser panels, it looks and sounds fantastic, and is one of the nicest demo rooms I have visited. Mike and Mark, and all the team at Cultured Audio have put a lot of time and effort into their facilities to make it such a great place to visit and hear some wonderful HiFi, and if you get the chance, please contact them to listen at their wonderful premises in Oxford.
I want to say a massive thank you to all of them for making me so welcome and hosting such a great event like this and hope that their will be many more to follow in the future, and a massive thanks to Daniel Raggett of Symphony Distribution who has such a wonderful portfolio of products now like Esoteric, Montaudio and Kerr Acoustic speakers as well as many others.
Make sure you check out all my social media channels for lots more content with all the videos of the day.
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