I just noticed that Ken Kessler’s lavish book on the history of KEF contains several pages on the Concord – the speaker I have been re-building in active form. He makes it sound like a much better speaker than I found it to be prior to conversion, but maybe I just had a bad pair.
The mark IV version looked subtly cheaper and less sophisticated than the III due to small details like the badge, base plinth which was now plastic and the texture of the all-round fabric. It had a removable plastic cap on the top of the enclosure, and it seems that this was to allow users to change the ‘sock’ for different colours, although no one ever bought anything but black and brown, leaving warehouses full of the other colours – how I would love to have some of them now!
There’s also a story of one of the bosses getting his wife to try one on as a boob tube…
UPDATE 07/10/16
I bought some KEF Celeste IV (the Concord’s smaller sister) for the original stands, in order to use them with my Concords. It isn’t all that straightforward to re-use the stands with my version III speakers, however – some engineering is going to be required. One Celeste tweeter wasn’t working so I replaced both with the ones from my Concords which are supposedly the same type. They now actually sound quite good – much better than I remember my Concords sounding.
The Rational Audiophile 