Klipsch The Sevens II review: Enthusiastic speakers bring the energy

Klipsch has applied its long-established expertise to a thoroughly modern streaming system concept – and while The Sevens II might be a dog’s dinner of a model name, it’s attached to a product that’s very serious indeed.

Price & Availability

The Sevens II is on sale now. In the United Kingdom a pair is priced at £1799. The going rate in the United States is $1999. Australian customers, meanwhile, will have to part with something like AU$3999.

Features & What's New?

Take the magnetically attached grille off one of the Klipsch and you’re confronted by a quite assertive driver array.

At the top, recessed into Tractrix horn geometry that’s an integral part of the baffle, there’s a 25mm titanium tweeter of the company’s proprietary ‘linear travel suspension’ vented design.

Beneath this is a 165mm mid/bass driver – it’s one of Klipsch’s ‘Jet cerametallic’ designs, which means it’s made of aluminium that’s been anodised and electrochemically treated in order for a layer of ceramic to form on its outer surfaces.

This line-up is augmented by an unsurprisingly large bass reflex port that vents at the rear of the cabinet through a rather more strongly defined horn than the tweeter uses.

Between this port and the two-driver array, Klipsch is claiming a frequency response of 39Hz - 25kHz, which comes about thanks to a total of 200 watts of Class D power. Each mid/bass driver receives 80 watts of amplification, each tweeter gets 20 watts to drive it.

Naturally, there’s a primary speaker and a secondary speaker here. The secondary speaker features a connection for mains power, that bass reflex port, and an RJ45 socket for connection to the primary on its rear panel – the primary has a fair bit more going on back there.

Physical sockets consist of line-level and moving magnet phono inputs on stereo RCA sockets, digital coaxial and digital optical inputs, USB-A and USB-C slots, and two HDMI sockets.

Both the HDMI input and the eARC output are a 2.1 standard, and this means that not only are gaming features like ALLM and VRR catered for, but The Sevens II can also deal with Dolby Atmos audio and pass through HDR10+ and Dolby Vision HDR content too. The system offers virtualised height channels when spatial audio content is detected.

There’s a pre-out for a subwoofer, a 3.5mm input for use with the supplied calibration mic, an RJ45 for connection to the secondary speaker, and an Ethernet socket.

Those who prefer as much wirelessness as possible will be pleased to hear that dual-band Wi-Fi is on board, giving access to Apple AirPlay 2, Google Cast and the ‘Connect’ versions of Qobuz, Spotify and Tidal.

The speakers can be also connected wirelessly, although this cuts the resolution from the system’s native 24bit/96kHz to 24bit/48kHz. There’s also Bluetooth 5.4 available, with SBC and AAC codec compatibility.

The streaming platform, incidentally, is supplied by Onkyo. Which goes quite a long way towards explaining the Klipsch’s facility with the more cutting-edge HDMI technologies and specifications.

Performance

Whether or not you’re intrigued by what I’m about to say about the way the Klipsch The Sevens II performance depends a fair bit on the sort of attitude you like in the way your music is delivered.

If you enjoy a vibrant, upfront, spirited account of music, The Sevens II have plenty that will appeal to you. That they sound big and bold and punchy is only to be expected – these are Klipsch speakers, after all, and not especially small ones.

The Sevens II summon considerable low-frequency presence and hit with the sort of merciless intent of a heavyweight boxer – but they have plenty of detail to go along with it, so there is appreciable variation in the way bass sounds are presented.

They are controlled with a fair amount of care too, so the presentation is confident and naturalistic where rhythms are concerned. It’s a similar story through the rest of the frequency range, despite the fact that the frequency response is tilted more than a little towards the bottom end.

The midrange is communicative and direct, and there’s a fair amount of attack at the top end too – and throughout, the same attention to detail and the same facility with tonal variation is apparent. The fundamental tonality is on the mildly toasty side, mind you.

The soundstage on offer here is broad and well-defined, the layout allowing even those recordings with numerous participants the sort of space required for each element to fully express itself.

There’s a fair amount of dynamic headroom available – the Klipsch system is capable of switching between ‘quite quiet’ and ‘absolutely thunderous’ without any appreciable stress or even effort.

Between this facility and the system’s ability to put transient detail into proper context, it’s almost possible to overlook the fact that the Klipsch is wont to gloss over the finest, most subtle details in a recording in favour of emphasising drive and attack.

In fact, this is basically The Sevens II attitude in its entirety. Its front-foot, energetic attitude and character is very welcome indeed when playing music that benefits from it – but switch to something quiet and/or understated and the system’s impatience is almost audible.

If it’s nuance and delicacy you’re after, if your favourite music can be described this way, then this Klipsch system is probably not the most sympathetic way to hear it.

Neither is its phono stage the most enjoyable of its inputs. Everything I’ve written up to this point can be applied to the sound through each of the other inputs, both wired and wireless – but the moving magnet phono input lacks some of the positivity of the other methods of playback, and sounds rather two-dimensional by comparison.

The HDMI loop proves very useful indeed for those who want to put a rocket up the sound of their TV but don’t have the inclination to use a dedicated soundbar (though the physical size of The Sevens II make it slightly tricky to accommodate as part of a home theatre set-up).

It’s true to say the ‘virtualised’ height channels served up when the system is in receipt of Dolby Atmos content are mild in their effect, but the overall attitude of the Klipsch suits a lot of movie soundtracks, and its ability to project the midrange with some force helps with dialogue intelligibility no end.

Design & Usability

Control of the system is available via some physical controls on the top of the primary speaker – or, at least, volume control is. There’s also a ‘multifunction’ button here, the purpose of which can be defined in the ‘Klipsch Connect’ app.

The app is a very thorough interface. In addition to volume and playback control, it features five EQ presets plus the ability to define a custom preset using a five-band equaliser, ‘movie’, ‘music’ and ‘direct’ audio adjustment settings, the chance to define the primary speaker as the left or the right channel, adjust latency for lip-sync and plenty more besides.

There’s also a small remote control handset that takes care of some of the headline functions. It has a touch of backlighting, which is a rarity and for which Klipsch is to be commended.

As far as design is concerned, it’s fundamentally Klipsch business as usual here – whether or not that’s a good thing is entirely a matter of taste.

The Sevens II are fairly big (381 x 206 x 318mm, HxWxD), fairly boxy speakers that, with the exception of the front baffle, consist of straight lines and pointy corners.

The main body of the cabinet is made of real wood veneer over MDF – the speakers in the pictures are in the most recent, ‘red oak’, finish – but if you prefer, there’s ‘ebony’ or ‘walnut’. No matter the colour you select, it arrives as part of a very high standard of construction and finish.

The rather more curvaceous front baffle is made of bulk moulding compound – Klipsch has specified this material because of its density and rigidity, and for the strong resonance rejection characteristics it offers.

Its curved radius helps extend the width of the soundstage and also improves the off-axis performance. Of course, if you don’t fancy the sight of the drivers and their surround, Klipsch supplies magnetically attached grilles that cover the entirety of the baffle.

Verdict

There’s a lot to be said for the excitement and energy the Klipsch The Sevens II bring to bear when reproducing music.

When you factor in the system’s facility with scale, dynamism and broad-strokes insight, it follows that, given the right stuff to work with, this can be a thrillingly involving listening experience.

But its relative lack of subtlety – or, more accurately, its relative lack of interest in the notion of subtlety – means these Klipsch speakers won't be the complete article for all musical tastes.

Also Consider

It’s rather longer in the tooth than The Sevens II, but nevertheless the KEF LS50 Wireless II system remains the product to beat – and thanks to its longevity it’s now down to more or less the same money as the Klipsch. Visually distinct, sonically exceptional and extremely easy to live with, it’s been the market leader for this long for good reason – but it doesn’t have the breadth of connectivity the Klipsch offers.