The great thing about CES is that most companies come out in full force... not just their sales staff, but they bring along heavyweight tech people as well. Kicker had their designers on hand to answer tech questions in their staging area.
Of course, I take advantage (to the degree that my business cohorts groan when they see certain booths come into view
).
It IS a round L7 - but there are differences.
This year, Kicker modified both the L5 and L7 cone assemblies, strengthening them in areas that they had an unacceptible number of failures in the previous 04/05 models. Other than that, the L5 is unchanged.
The L7 they tweaked though - making it more of that "boom car" sub by design, rather than leaving it with middle-of-the-road BL and Qts values.
They went with a machined top plate (similar to the traditional TC Sounds stock designs) to bring the coil-to-gap ratio closer... by design increasing BL, lowering Qts, and the trade-off being a lower linear Xmax, but no reduction in Xmech (if that matters to you - the SPL guys will
).
The L5 on the other hand, they described in the same breath as being "basically an L7 motor with a round cone", as also "tweaked more for a SQ application".
...my guess would be the 04/05 L7 motor topology, with it's longer Xmax and more sealed/ported compatible Qts, as well as increasing moving mass to lower Fs.
This move does make sense... if you are going to market the L7 as a boom-car sub, make it a boom-car sub.
And if you don't want to leave your SQ guys out in the cold, that's honorable too, IMO.
But as a Kicker dealer (or rather, a shop I do marketing/business consulting for), it means not only do we now have to clear out our '05 inventory that has been replaced, but we have the additional overhead and unknowns associated with taking on inventory of a sub that is expensive, and that we aren't familiar with, and don't even know if it will sell... but those are the breaks.