Thonet & Vander Kugel Studio Monitors Review

German multinational audio brand, Thonet & Vander have sent us a set of their Kugel Studio Monitors to review.

The Kugel comes with a 6.5″ woofer made entirely of lightweight aramid fibre and a tweeter made of silk to deliver a responsive sound. In addition, the upper suspension ring is made of highly elastic rubber, allowing larger displacement sensitivity and resistance to the beats of sound.

We’ve been using the speakers for the last few weeks so read on to see how we got on.

What’s in the Box

The speakers come with a 3.5mm phono cable, a remote control, instructions and the cable for connecting the two speakers. Inside the box, there are also two power cables, one for IE/UK and one for Europe.

Features

The Kugel uses Bluetooth 4.0 Aptx technology and also includes RCA 3.5mm Stereo and S/PDIF optical inputs. The speakers are enclosed in an HDAA (High-Density Acoustic Absorber) wooden finish housing. The front grills are easily removed to expose the speakers should you wish. On the side of the active speaker, there are a number of buttons which are used for volume control, input switching and Bluetooth pairing.

The speakers also come with an IR remote control. The remote control can perform the same functions as the buttons on the side but also includes buttons for increasing or decreasing bass and treble levels and includes Play/Pause and skip buttons.

For the most part, the remote control works well but it can be very frustrating when turning the speakers on and off as there is no confirmation to let you know it’s happened so you often end up turning the speakers off by pressing the button again thinking that the first press didn’t work. A beep to confirm the action would really help here.

Setup

Setting up the speakers is relatively straightforward but there are some things to keep in mind. Only one of the speakers is active and needs to be powered while the other passive one is connected to the active speaker with the included cable. The cable is about 2 meters long so the speakers will need to be located within that distance in your setup. Because the speakers need to be connected this way, they are more suited to being placed on a shelf or desk rather than being stand mounted.

Sound

For the review, I set the speakers up at either end of my desk and angled them in towards me until I found the best possible soundstage taking into account how close I’d be sitting to the speakers. Positioned at either end of the desk there was about 1.5 meters of separation between the speakers and they were about 0.3 meters from the wall behind.

As I mentioned above, I have been using the speakers for several weeks now before starting the review. This has given the speakers time to burn in and in my opinion, there has been a noticeable improvement in the sound quality from when they came out of the box.

I tested the speakers using a MacBook Pro and an iPad Pro using Bluetooth and also via a Dragonfly Cobalt through the USB C port on the tablet.

The first thing you notice with these speakers is that they are room-filling loud. It takes a little bit of time to find a volume setting on the speakers that then allows you to just use the volume control on your device so small increases doesn’t blast your ears!

Depending on the device I was testing with them, or the method of connection, I also then found it necessary to adjust the treble and bass settings on the speaker to get a sound I was happy with. This isn’t something I’d be happy to have to keep adjusting if I was swapping between different devices regularly so it would be best if these speakers were left connected to one device for most of their use.

Connecting any speakers or headphones to a MacBook Pro usually doesn’t have a good result but I wanted to test the speakers in a setup that would be common for many people. In fairness to the Kugel, once I used an equaliser on the Mac they did a pretty good job with what they were given.

The equipment that produced the best results during my testing was the iPad Pro combined with the Dragonfly Cobalt. The sound quality was great and needed no adjustments at all for a satisfying result.

The star of the show for the Kugel is its bass performance. The 6.5” woofers produce a ton of powerful bass but it never gets out of hand. As a result of the strong bass performance, the mids and vocals can seem a little recessed at times but with more usage, this has improved. There’s a noticeable drop off in the highs but that’s the only real weakness in the speakers considering their retail price.

With the setup we used, the speakers created a good stereo image and even though we were very close to them they still gave a good sense of width from each channel.

Conclusion

When I was reviewing these speakers I had to keep reminding myself that they retail for £329. When you are presented with a stereo pair of monitors like this it’s easy to expect them to be far more expensive than they are. At their price range the Kugel is competing with things like the Apple Homepod and while they might lack the smart features of Apple’s speaker, the sound produced by the pair of Kugel speakers is far superior.

There are many ways you can use the Kugel speakers in your home. You can use them as a 2.0 setup for your TV and they will produce enough bass that the lack of a subwoofer won’t be noticed. You can use them as desktop monitors like we did for this review or you could set them up in a room to just listen to music and they will fill that room with sound.

If these speakers retailed for five or six hundred euro then this review wouldn’t be so flattering but there’s a lot bang for your buck here and anyone considering going out to buy a single speaker for a similar price should stop and listen to the Thonet & Vander Kugel first before they make up their mind.

The Thonet & Vander Kugel can be purchased from Amazon UK for £329.

Full speaker specs: