Fink Team Kim Speakers
REFERENCE AUDIO – WITHAM ESSEX
BOB’s Review Series - No 21 – Fink Team KIM Speakers
Introduction – Fink Team from Essen in Germany was established by company owner Karl-Heinz Fink and have until recently been best known for behind-the-scenes consultancy work with other speaker manufacturers on a strictly confidential basis where they offer design and technical advice and have been doing so for several decades. This was augmented in 2016 when Fink Team decided to showcase a prototype of their very first in-house own brand floor standing speaker at the Munich High-end Hi-Fi show. This speaker was subsequently developed into their first commercially available own brand speaker with the WM-4 moniker. But it was an expensive entry level speaker at around £60,000 and wanting to reach a wider customer base they recently introduced a more domestically acceptable and affordable floor stander called Borg at £22,900. Late last year Fink Team released their first stand mount speaker which is the subject of this review and it is simply called KIM.
In December Nintronics became one of the very first UK dealers to have this speaker available for demonstration but Covid lockdown rules have meant that it has languished in our studio rooms awaiting the day when customers are again able to book a demo. It seemed fitting therefore that I should bring it home to run it in and to form an opinion ready for the day when we can once again welcome customers to our store.
Borg was clearly named after Star Trek’s arch enemy The Borg and the KIM is reputedly named after Ensign Harry Kim, also from Star Trek. Kim is a rather more cost effective £8,900 (all at the time of writing) including supplied and pre-mounted stands, still a high price for a stand mount speaker so let’s see if we think it is value for money.
Technology – Fink Team place much emphasis on cabinet and crossover design and the KIM uses a double layer sandwich cabinet with internal bracing and high-quality parts in the crossover. To put the KIM into perspective their current range consists of just three speakers now in commercial production. WM-4 (the prototype was nicknamed the washing machine) is a sleeker device now it’s in production but it still weighs in at 135kg each and is a 3-way speaker with a 15” bass driver, twin 5.5” mid-range drivers and an AMT ribbon tweeter, it measures 1420 x 450 and 580 (HWD). Borg is a reflex loaded speaker and is more domestically acceptable but still demands a decent sized room to perform at its best. It is a 2-way speaker with 10.5” bass driver and 90x26mm AMT (Mundorf) tweeter weighing in at a more manageable 52kg each and measures 1050 x 300 and 400 (HWD).
KIM is a smaller reflex loaded stand mount speaker with oblong rear port but it is larger than many competing stand mounts and is a 2-way with an 8” paper coned bass driver with oversized magnets and 110mm AMT (Air Motion Transformer) tweeter by Mundorf weighing in at just 25kg including stands. It measures 854 x 300 x 412 (HWD) including stands. Sensitivity is 86dB and impedance is around 8ohms nominal. It comes with dedicated lightweight open frame steel stands already fixed to the speakers and these may look flimsy when compared to most speaker stands but Fink Team say they have been designed to give maximum performance and to be less intrusive on sound quality, they also look good. The stands angle the speakers backwards a little to give better driver time alignment and to add perceived height to the music presentation making them sound bigger than they are. Fink speakers come with rear panel mounted user adjustable controls and the KIM has one for treble output and one for bass damping which should be set to match the type of power amplifier you are using. I used them with Treble set at 0 and Bass Damping set at 1 for transistor amps.
Our demo speakers came in matt Amarra Ebony with Black front baffle, and they looked spectacular in this finish (see photo below). Other finishes are available including matt white with grey baffle and a variety of real wood timber finishes with contrasting front baffles. I believe the Borg is also available in any colour you may want to request at point of order and at a cost to be advised and I assume this service may also available for the KIM, so you can match them to your favourite vintage car paint or Happy Socks, if you so desire.
System Components – I had to reconfigure my listening room a bit to accommodate these speakers in order to find the best position for listening and with this done they temporarily replaced my Marten floor standers. I positioned them in open space around 2.5m apart and a metre from the front (the wall behind the speakers which for some reason I always think of as the rear wall) and side walls and toed them in just enough that from my seating position around 3.5m from the speakers I could clearly see the inside face of the side panels. Borg likes not to be close to side walls and the KIM seemed to follow this trait so narrower rooms might not be appropriate unless fired across the room, they are less critical of rear wall positioning. They were powered from my Michi P5 Pre-amp and M8 Monobloc power amps and fed with music from my Innuos Zenith Mk3 server, Sony CD player and FM radio. I used a Matrix Audio X-Sabre Pro (MQA) DAC with all cables from Jorma Design. I also used the new Innuos PhoenixNET Network Switch (see my recent review) to deliver data streamed via ethernet connection from Qobuz and Tidal.
Performance – I must admit to falling instantly in love with Borg when we briefly had a pair on demo late last autumn, its build quality and finishes are exquisite although some may not like the sculpted cabinet shape. This was all before I actually heard it and when I did my love blossomed, I am after all a dedicated Star Trek fan and I was eager to hear what the KIM could do. They were virtually fresh out of the box only having had a few hours use in the studio since their arrival just before Christmas so they were a little bright to start with but started to relax after around 24 hours use but if the Borg is anything to go by, I understand they could take up to 200 hours to run in.
After I had run them for around 35 hours they had started to really relax and were sounding much more enjoyable, the treble was more refined and the mid-range and base had settled down by becoming more dynamic, slightly warmer and better able to handle instruments and vocals in a cohesive mix with the tweeter.
These speakers don’t have the overblown bass that some stand mounts try and mostly fail to deliver but they do deliver bass in sufficient quantity as demanded by the source to present a deep and enjoyable bandwidth, just as it should be. They are probably best described as ‘accurate’, but I mean that in the best possible way, they are not studio monitor accurate, they are much more musical than that and easy to live with for very long listening sessions and the do really good bass, something monitor speakers don’t usually do very well.
‘Now I’m In It’ by HAIM is a very punchy and fast flowing track with a running bass rhythm backing up the vocals and the KIM reproduced this with clarity and drive that makes you want to get up and dance. How much better can it get? I have a few great tracks for testing the bass response of speakers and I listened to ‘Mi Mujer’ by Nicolas Jarr and ‘Confession’ by Alesso and these two tracks showed the improbably deep bass these standmount speakers can generate in your home. This is not just deep bass but bass with detail and feeling which is not an easy trick to perform and many speakers don’t get it right.
‘Billie Jean’ by The Civil Wars’ is a great version of the Michael Jackson classic and the vocal medley presented by Joy Williams and John Paul White singing in harmony together is something special and the KIM was able to deliver on this promise.
I found these speakers don’t encourage track skipping making listening to whole albums a must and an audio delight and none more so than with Lucinda William’s This Sweet Old World album from the early 90’s (CD). It came across with great clarity and inflection to her voice with a wide soundstage in all directions giving Lucinda the platform she needed to perform at her best, just for me it seemed.
I then played Oxygene from the Jean-Michel Jarre Trilogy release on CD and the KIM delivered it with sparkle and clarity whilst maintaining a decent amount of Bass dynamics, fully able to keep up with the music. The clarity delivered by the AMT tweeter is not overly bright and the Fink Team have engineered a seamless transition between it and the mid-bass driver such that the sound comes through without any loss or gaps where one driver passes on to the other. The less than common wide front baffle of these speakers goes against the grain of many other modern floor and standmount speakers that seem to have baffles not much wider than their drive units, but the Fink Team have found a way to do this and to make it disappear with no discernible adverse influence on sound quality that is sometimes apparent with unwanted reflections from poorly designed wide baffle speakers. This allows Fink to incorporate an 8” drive unit with ease where others would probably have settled for 5” or 6” drivers in a slimline baffle, and the increased and unforced bass response that the wide baffle and 8”driver delivers is immediately noticeable, in a good way.
I queued up Dead Can Dance and played ‘The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove’ (Qobuz 44.1/16bit), this is a track that has a lot going on and the KIM was able to cope impressively well with clarity and resolution normally present in only the finest and usually more expensive floor standing speakers.
Now 50 hours in and the KIM’s are sounding much more cohesive in their delivery. I guess they will continue to improve for a while yet, but they have probably reached 90-95% of their ultimate performance by now. Martyn Joseph has a rather sibilant vocal presentation which can be off putting with overly bright speakers but the AMT tweeter on the KIM was able to deliver his voice with limited sibilance without reducing detail or loss of sparkle.
I concluded this review with 60+ hours on the speakers and listened to some Elvis. ‘In The Ghetto’ showed how talented he was and what a loss he was to all of us, now more than 40 years since his untimely death. I also played ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’ by Sade and the KIM showcased her intimate vocals and background dynamics with spectacular clarity leaving me wanting more.
Conclusion – My wife whose name is also Kim really liked these speakers and not just because they were her namesake, but it was the size, shape and finish and I have to agree with her, they are rather special. I had only had a few hours listening to the Borg in our showroom late last year, so I don’t have a direct comparison, but they are clearly from the same design team in terms of looks, finish, build quality and sound presentation. The Borg goes deeper and from memory is a little more relaxed and can fill big rooms with sound but if your budget and or domestic constraints mean that a stand mount speaker best fits your needs then you won’t regret buying the KIM.
What the Fink Team have achieved here is nothing short of remarkable and if you are in the market for a floor standing or stand mount speaker at this price point or even well above this price point then KIM should definitely be on your shortlist. Sounds counter intuitive ha, just wait until you hear them. They are not just toe tappingly good, they are let’s get up and dance good.
I would recommend using around 100/150w of good clean transistor power for these speakers. I’m not sure valve amps would be a good match, but I haven’t tried that combination yet. You can probably tell by now that I like these speakers and hopefully you will too. I could easily accommodate these at home even though my own floor standing speakers are many times the price. Now I really want to hear the Borg at home.
Bob – Team Reference Audio
bob@referenceaudio.co.uk