MEET THE TITANS, Part 1: Titan 505

There’s a phrase you’ll often hear on the lips of the Kudos Audio team. “There’s a Titan for every music lover.”

It’s a nice adage. But what does it mean, fundamentally, in practice? 

While it admittedly makes an effective marketing pitch for our current generation of loudspeakers, there’s another, deeper meaning at its heart. It is, truthfully, the key driving philosophy behind the entire Titan range. 

Designing the flagship Titan 808 was an exercise in putting aside the rule book, and the balance sheet, and creating a loudspeaker that delivered the absolute pinnacle of Kudos listening in every possible respect. Following on from the 808s critical and consumer success, the rest of the range was built to emulate as much of the flagship’s power and potency as physically possible, in a myriad of different ways, for a myriad of different listeners. 

When we say “There’s a Titan for every music lover”, we mean it sincerely. If you love music, there is a speaker in this range that will fit your listening habits and your living situation. 

And in this new journal series, MEET THE TITANS, we hope to demonstrate exactly that. Over the next few volumes, we’ll take each Titan in turn; look under the hood, consider its sonic characteristics, and ask ‘who is the perfect listener for this speaker?’.

We start our journey with the smallest speaker in the Titan range. A cult hero amongst bookshelf enthusiasts and beyond. The Kudos Audio Titan 505.

The Pocket Titan: Meet the Titan 505

In the world of high-fidelity audio, stand-mount loudspeakers can often occupy a bit of a specific niche. Excellent performers, garnering a vast fan club of bookshelf aficionados; yet for some, representing something of a ‘compromise’ when compared to their floor-standing brethren, especially in the realm of deep, visceral bass. 

Enter the Kudos Audio Titan 505, the lone stand-mount in the acclaimed Titan range. This pint sized sister speaker of the larger Titan 606, far from being a ‘compromise’, is a stealthy technological powerhouse, designed to deliver a ‘big speaker’ personality without dominating a living space. It’s a compelling proposition for the modern audiophile who demands engineering excellence and spatial efficiency in equal measure.

Derek Gilligan, MD of Kudos Audio, knew he was onto something from the start with the Titan 505. “It was loads of fun to design…it put a huge smile on my face from the moment we tried out the prototype. When we launched it I thought it would have a limited market due to its price point for a bookshelf, but I think people see it more as an entry level Titan than a standmount. It’s got its own little fan club now.”

Let’s take a look at why this fan club finds the Titan 505 so special, by taking a glimpse…

Under The Hood

Beneath the clean, modern aesthetic of the Titan 505 lies a quiet masterclass in acoustic engineering. While it presents as a compact two-way, rear-ported stand-mount, its true nature is far more complex, intelligently holding onto all sorts of flagship technology from its larger siblings in the Titan family.

Isobaric System

As with the full range of Titan loudspeakers, the most head-turning technical feature of the Titan 505 is its isobaric bass reflex system. This is a relatively rare design approach in modern audio engineering; one that involves two identical bass drive units operating in tandem within the cabinet, wired in parallel. While only one 180mm mid-bass unit is visible to the listener, a second, identical unit is internally mounted directly behind it, firing into a shared, pressurised internal chamber.

In the Titan 505, this arrangement adopts a back-to-back configuration before the reflex port. Isobaric loading effectively doubles the driver area and maintains a tight grip on the behaviour of the air within the enclosure, allowing the cabinet to achieve a significantly deeper and more controlled low-frequency extension: the kind typically associated with a much larger speaker volume. This system is one of the reasons the Titan 505 offers the potential to deliver such resonant, well-handled bass from its relatively modest footprint. 

SEAS Drivers

Another no-compromise element of the Titan 505’s design comes in the form of its custom-designed SEAS drivers, designed by and built exclusively for Kudos Audio, and seen throughout the Titan range. 

A 29mm SEAS-Kudos K3 fabric dome tweeter is designed for refined, extended, and balanced high frequencies, avoiding the ‘zing’ or exaggeration that can sometimes accompany stand-mount designs attempting to bely a bigger surface area than they actually have. 

In the mid-bass range, two 180mm SEAS-Kudos units feature double-coated paper cones, a 39mm voice coil with a copper shorting ring, and a handsome aluminium phase plug featuring the Kudos logo. These drivers are not off-the-shelf; they are built only for use in Kudos Audio loudspeakers and painstakingly optimised for the demands of the speaker’s isobaric system.

Cabinet & Crossover

The cabinet itself doesn’t just make a pleasing addition to your living space. It’s been meticulously constructed from varying thicknesses of high-grade materials; a process employing sophisticated resonance control processes, with the beautifully rendered external sides decoupled from the inner cabinet structure. This decoupling offers better control of energy flow, ensuring that any driver-induced vibration is not radiated into the room, preserving clarity and attack in the audio experience.

Kudos speakers have become well-known industry wide for their low-order crossovers, built to our ‘masterfully simple’ design philosophy (read more about that here!). While this crossover ensures the Titan 505 performs beautifully in passive operation, they are also incredibly easy to bypass, allowing for seamless active operation alongside our custom-built unpowered active crossover, SIGAO DRIVE. More on that later.

The Listening Experience

“The Kudos Titan 505 is one of the most impressively well-balanced loudspeakers in its price and beyond.” – HiFi Plus Magazine

When hearing the Titan 505 for the first time, many listeners describe a wholesale recalibration of expectations. Don’t expect the sonic experience of a typical standmount; the Titan 505 takes you much closer to the feeling of a full-scale loudspeaker. However, the Titan 505 still manages to retain the intrinsic values so often loved by bookshelf enthusiasts – namely speed, coherence, and excellent point-source imaging.

The most immediately noticeable element of the Titan 505’s performance is, unequivocally, its bass. The isobaric loading provides a sense of power and drive that seems to defy the cabinet’s dimensions. It’s a foundation that is at once deep and taut. Whatever music you choose to press play on – from old-skool 90s dance to a Rachmaninoff piano concerto – the Titan 505 always maintains superb sonic control.

Above this deeply impressive bass is a nuanced and well-balanced mid range that is highly coherent and detailed, without straying into the overtly analytical. This is further elevated by the performance of the high end, which sits comfortably in an agreeably enjoyable space – neither aggressive nor noticeably rolled off. It’s an honest and natural high-end experience that manages to avoid aural fatigue, whilst providing superb detail to every arrangement. 

The Ideal Listener

The Kudos Titan 505 occupies a very specific, highly desirable sweet spot in the high-end audio market. If the following sounds like you, you may want to go and give the Titan 505 a try. 

High End Sound for the Modern Home

This speaker is tailor-made for the music lover who wants true high-end performance but lives in a modestly-sized living room, apartment, or secondary listening space where large floor-standers are simply not practical – making them kind of perfect for the standard British or European living space. 

With dimensions of 45 × 25.6 × 32cm, the 505 is a true stand-mount, and by definition, something of a space-saver when compared to larger floor standers. Yet, its isobaric design means it does not compromise on the low-frequency girth and scale that makes its music reproduction truly thrilling. It’s the “big personality” loudspeaker that fits without dominating the décor.

Much like its flexibility in the home, the 505 is a true ‘all-rounder’ when it comes to sonic performance. It maintains plenty of detail and emotion at low volumes, while retaining the ability to really flourish when the volume gets cranked. Paired with appropriately powerful, high quality amplification, the 505 will soak in power and translate it into visceral and jaw-dropping musical performance. 

This, above all else, is why the Titan 505 has garnered such a loving fan club. Whatever music you throw at it, it will deliver in spades. It’s a loudspeaker for those who wear their heart on their sleeve, and unapologetically love their music with every fibre of their being. If that sounds like you, you’re going to love this speaker. 

An Exciting Upgrade Path

For many, the Titan 505 won’t be the conclusion to their listening journey, but an exciting step into a new and thrilling sonic adventure. 

The Titan 505 performs fabulously as a passive-driven loudspeaker. But introduce SIGAO DRIVE, and your listening experience transposes into whole new, previously untold levels of musical purity. 

SIGAO DRIVE allows you to operate your Titan 505s in active configuration alongside almost any brand of amplifier you choose to use. Our unpowered active crossover is supplied custom-fitted with the correct plugs for both your Kudos loudspeakers, and your chosen power amplifiers. And when you change your speakers or amplifiers, all you have to do is swap out the plugs.

A bookshelf speaker the Titan 505 may be, but its appeal stretches far beyond the confines of bookshelf enthusiasts. This is a highly engineered solution for the modern music lover; a true Titan that delivers vast, controlled sound and unparalleled technological flexibility in a beautiful, manageable package.

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