Kii Three - my impressions and pro reviews

[fas42]

How are the speakers locked into place on the stands? If I had these, one of the first things I would do is experiment with various ways of coupling the cabinets to the stands - to see what that told me.

[fas42]

I wonder how much the BXTs, with that more secure mounting, are providing the benefits of mass loading, apart from any low bass additions. IOW, two pairs of Kii Threes in the same room, one on the Kii stands, the other locked onto the BXT cabinet, without the latter turned on - do they sound, ummm, identical?

 

BTW, in the video, still far too much wobble in the assembly - note the rocking of the cabinets at the end ...

[fas42]

I have a friend who had old, tiny Tannoy speakers - ones where the tweeter is almost as big as the mid/bass unit - mounted on pretty solid steel stands. We did numerous experiments on how to couple the cabinets to these stands - and everything mattered. Ended up, because the aesthetics were irrelevant, using tie down straps, the type of things you get from motor accessory, camping shops to clamp the cabinets as hard as possible to the stands; precisely where one applies pressure is crucial here.

 

What was gained? 'Bigness' of sound; clarity, detail in greatly expanded soundstage - no negatives ...

[fas42]

9 hours ago, ragwo said:

I'm thinking of using Blu Tack for coupling the speakers to the stands and sorbothane discs for decoupeling the stands from the floor. Hopefully it will prevent my dog or kids from toppling the speakers

 

My approach is to always use everyday, low cost materials unless there is something special to be gained from using an expensive, "audiophile" option. Which means I have used Blu Tack for decades; with good results.

 

Personally, I would experiment with coupling the stands to the floor, or some very heavy base underneath - with Blu Tack, again.

 

How the coupling material is used is key: do it only at the points of greatest rigidity of the cabinet base, which is usually the four corners; and make it stick, really stick on both surfaces - I apply my full weight to the cabinet, forcing the substance to "squeeze out". The result should be that if you try and lift up the cabinet, that the stands will want to come along too, .

 

[fas42]

My approach would be completely different ... I would determine which part of the bottom of the speakers was the most rigid, in at least 4 positions, around the corners obviously in this case, completely ignoring any pads come between the speakers and stand. Then I would work the Blu Tack thoroughly, so that it's as sticky as possible, and apply a major wad of the stuff in those 4 positions earlier determined; the pads have to be completely eliminated from doing anything. And then jam the speaker down hard, really hard on the wads of goo, so it squeezes out.

[fas42]

The point of the Blu Tack is to form a certain type of, mechanical, connection between the cabinet and the stand - if the pads are involved they are complicating the link, and may largely counteract the value of using the Blu Tack.

 

This is all open to experimentation - try making Blu Tack the only physical connection, see what it sounds like; then try Blu Tack and pads in combination - have you gained or lost anything by changing to that approach?

[fas42]

16 hours ago, Emlin said:

 

Ok, I sort of get that, but what's wrong that you think needs correcting?

 

People have different ideas about how the energy of vibration should be handled - arguments about coupling and decoupling ensue. My personal experience is that methods that transfer that energy to much greater mass are the most effective technique to use - IOW, I'm into strongly coupling ; mass loading is the principle being used - as an extreme visual example, consider the speaker being effectively embedded in a huge mound of concrete, tons and tons of it - the closer I can get physically to that situation the better the sound gets, is what I've found ... this is the main reason why those monstrously heavy speakers deliver the type of sound that they do - but why pay big money for the heaviness, .

 

So, rubbery, bouncy pads are miles from providing the mass loading one wants - the downside of stabilising the speaker will be that it becomes more revealing, and subtle, disturbing artifacts in the sound will be more obvious; the wobbling of the speaker which was masking those issues has been largely reduced. So then one can decide to let the speaker go back to vibrating more, to blur those issues; or, use the greater clarity now heard to experiment with tweaking in other areas, for optimising to achieve even better overall sound.

[fas42]

6 hours ago, baconbrain said:

Point taken. Still, I have the impression that the Kii‘s seem to be quite impervious to subtle changes, such as sample rate, phase of the power chords, and quality of the interconnects (ethernet) between the speakers.

 

Perhaps it‘s just my hearing that is not really noticing these details anymore, or my memory is playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember with other systems I have owned, that the above examples where much more noticeable when changed.

 

 

 

Quite a simple principle is involved: the closer a rig gets to being 'correct', and robust, the less you hear distortions being added by issues in the playback chain - all you are hearing is what's on the recording, which is firmly locked in an invariable state - unless the source is analogue, of course .

 

If the system sound keeps changing, by every thing you slightly alter, then it indicates that the engineering was not done well enough ... you are just adjusting the nature of the audible distortion being added, by varying things.

[fas42]

On 7/31/2019 at 9:24 AM, Emlin said:

 

In this case, no routers are present, but even if there were, I suspect that all perceived differences would disappear with a proper blind ABX test.

 

The big problem here is that most ABX tests are so far from "proper" that it isn't funny - the really dumb one is Foobar's, which is relied upon so often - flawed in its implementation so badly that even a desktop's motherboard sound chip makes it obvious that it has issues.

[fas42]

3 minutes ago, Emlin said:

 

Please explain - I'm intrigued!

 

Just a couple of the factors: the key one is that it doesn't use the files it's supposedly playing, no, it resamples to suit itself, and places working copies of that somewhere on the hard drive, possibly fragmented to hell; and, the interface keeps chattering during the replay with progress information ... if one wants to test whether CPU activity is a factor, no chance of eliminating that!

 

I used an extremely basic Nero player at the time, and immediately noticed that the foobar ABX replay was quite degraded compared to that simple software package  - and started to investigate.

[fas42]

8 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

What are the effects on SQ of a "hard drive, possibly fragmented"??

 

Either one accepts that electrical activity not directly connected with converting the digital signal to analogue, and any following buffering and other analogue circuitry, can possibly impact SQ - or one doesn't. If interference via some route is significant to the quality, then assume something like the hard drive thrashing to retrieve the file for each round of playback may be a factor - as compared to the data residing in optimal form on the surface.

 

The real point is that ABX is supposed to be testing, comparing various scenarios - if one in fact wants to check whether how the file is stored on the hard disk makes an audible difference, where A is defragmented, and B is a badly fragmented copy, deliberately so; then foobar ABX is useless as a tool.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, TheStupidOne said:

If you're talking about changing cat cables to improve sound quality, then no. Fortunately for all audiophiles that's not possible, so one less thing to worry our minds with. And one less expensive thing to buy.

 

 

 

It's never that simple. With devices that use electrical activity to reproduce sound there is always some level of exposure of the circuitry to unwanted waveforms, in the form of noise and interference - yes, it may seem incredibly unlikely, but if one wants isolation to be so good that the SQ never changes, no matter what electrical "nastiness" is around, then this requires very well thought out, applied engineering expertise.

 

There is a good analogy with the physical behaviour of cartridges on an LP - if one wants to completely eliminate every possible form of vibration affecting what the cartridge is registering while tracking the record, it turns out this is a very, very difficult thing to do; extreme forms of mechanical engineering have been devised to try and achieve this. And, unfortunately, it can be just as hard in the electrical world.

[fas42]

Some time ago I did an exercise in trying to achieve best playback sound from my HP laptop, now fully back to health, at least as far the display is concerned, . foobar was a non-starter, even used for straight playback; grey, dull, lifeless. Media Monkey got the nod in the end, and it was interesting to see the difference in how the two worked the machine: foobar was constantly twitching the hard drive, never allowed it to rest, and using up plenty of CPU cycles the whole time; MM sucked in the file in one solid gulp at the start, and then the drive went to sleep, program was almost invisible on the CPU monitor, the usage always sat at zero.

 

If one is not prepared to consider that non-obvious factors may be relevant, well ...

[fas42]

2 hours ago, Bernstein said:

 

If you ask the KII guys they don’t find cable tweaking necessary (which is good!)

 

 

Ummm, it's not good ... if they don't believe that cables improve, or alter, the sound for their gear, but customers are finding otherwise ... what motivation have they to improve the robustness of the engineering, so that in fact it is indeed the case that tweaking is unnecessary ... .

[fas42]

7 minutes ago, Emlin said:

Or tweaking is already unnecessary. There has not been a system built that some will claim couldn't be improved by snake oil.

 

Until they meet blind ABX testing and the supposed differences disappear. Then they claim that they were a bit tired or that their 'golden ears' only work when no-one is testing them.

 

Most blind ABX testing is never organised to a standard that's adequate - there are holes in the procedure that one can drive a truck through ... just doing some test is far short of a test that truly assesses what's going on.

 

Personally, how I address integrity issues is to work backwards - if I had a Kii I would deliberately make life hard for it; feed it very nasty mains power, place sources of high level RF next to them and the cables it's using;  and combine multiple "badnesses", all at once - nothing absurd, but things that could happen in real life. And see what happens ...

 

IOW, find the limits of its engineering robustness - then I have a handle on where it can be improved, .

[fas42]

48 minutes ago, Emlin said:

 

You may well wish to play with extreme situations when testing, but that should also be done with properly conducted blind ABX testing.

 

Otherwise your results will be meaningless, and you will have no handle of any sort.

 

If one chooses the 'right' recordings, then the impact on the sound is as trivially easy to hear as playing with the treble control on an ordinary car radio ... . One may wish to conduct "a proper ABX" to see if one can detect what fiddling with the HF output is doing on a 'mediocre' playback device - but I think for most people this would be somewhat redundant, .

 

The point is to organise the situation with the setup so that changes are obvious - immediate feedback is what one is after, to minimise wasting of time chasing irrelevancies.

[fas42]

39 minutes ago, firedog said:

Kii shouldn't make engineering decisions based on anectdotal and non repeateable customer reports. And individual user is free to do whatever he/she thinks is best. 

 

It also means that a 'competitor' can examine what they left undone, and create a new product based on the core of Kii, with "added goodness" ... sorta like how the car industry evolved ...

[fas42]

3 hours ago, Cazzesman said:

Cat6 is a tad larger in overall scale across the soundstage and a tad more forward in the vocal presentation.    Cat6e is possibly slightly cleaner in presentation with a fractionally smaller soundstage.    I am only talking small degrees of sound stage and 3d imaging.   Cat 6e presents like focusing a camera.   6e is just marginally more infocus that the Cat6 but the Cat6 looms marginally bigger in scope and imaging front to back.

 

 

 

My interpretation is that the 6e cable is doing things to get the sound in better shape - more forward is a sign of lesser SQ; cleaner in presentation, focusing a camera are markers of improvement.

 

The takeaway is that the Kii Threes are too sensitive to the quality of that link; firstly because you could hear a definite difference, and secondly because the extra shielding has moved the SQ in the right direction.

[fas42]

To my eyes, those distortion artifacts arising from attempting to EQ the speaker are due to a significant issue with the cabinet not being mass loaded sufficiently - I would aim to give the speaker effectively vastly greater 'weight' by some means - and then see what the measurements showed.

[fas42]

8 hours ago, Bernstein said:

 

The internal reflection is managed by the DSP programming. The distortion is linked to the size of the enclosure - the drivers need to work „hard“ meaning the travel of the driver is increased which lead to higher distortion. This is nothing special to the KII, it is the very nature of loudspeaker design, especially if you force very low frequencies. Bigger enclosure would support generating lower frequencies without forcing long travel of the drivers. But having a bigger enclosure leads also to other difficulties. Limiting the KII to 30-35Hz is one very simple measure. More can be done by EQ etc.

Question is: Is it really audible for you under normal conditions?

 

 

People often talk about speakers "having to work hard" as being the cause of subjectively significant problems in the sound - but my experience is otherwise, . I have been amazed over the years, at how even "cheap and nasty' drivers do a remarkably good job of delivering the musical message - given half a chance.

 

Yes, forcing high excursions to get bass is bound to test the limits of the engineering of the driver - but provided one doesn't go silly on this, then, subjectively, quite superb sound can be realised from very modest drivers.

 

[fas42]

32 minutes ago, 6o4o said:

Interesting! I really wonder the electrical physics behind this.😏

 

The comment that the weakest link determines the sound is exactly right - it is why we use the chain analogy; for an actual metal chain if almost all the links can handle 100 tonnes of forces, but a single one of the 100 links can only take 10 tonnes, then the chain is crippled, and can never do better than 10 tonnes in pulling on something ... most people in audio never really understand this, they keep adding adding links that can handle 500 tonnes, say, everywhere except where the weak one is; and despair when the SQ never reaches a standard that they hope for ...

 

USB is a poor mechanism for transferring digital audio data - not because the digital data is ever compromised, but because the structure of that link is highly prone to allowing electrical noise to transfer to the critical analogue areas of the chain; once that happens, the SQ is compromised. The enormous variety of "fixit" add-ons for the USB link is a giveaway that it is intrinsically a link of "10 tonnes" capacity - you therefore do what you have to do to try and strengthen it.

 

Electrical noise, from various sources, is the big killer of subjective SQ in digital audio - it was so the day the first CD player was released, and is still a major, major problem. There are no mysteries here ... merely a lack of interest by the industry in getting on top of it. No-one wants to measure what's going on; and hand-waving is used to push the whole thing further under the carpet, .

[fas42]

15 minutes ago, grubble said:

Immediate notes & reactions:

* amazing amount of clarity 

* where is all this bass coming from?

 

 

The sense of intense bass from a system is not about whether very low frequencies are present or not, but whether the waveform of the notes associated with the instrument creating them is reasonably accurately reproduced or not. Something that very few seem to appreciate,  ...

[fas42]

7 hours ago, Emlin said:

Do you really think that a digital signal is going to be corrupted by a little vibration? 

 

Impacts on SQ from tweaks in the digital area are never anything as obvious as "altering the bits" - while we stay in the digital world everything will run exactly as intended, unless there is an extreme issue. However, unfortunately, at some point a conversion to the analogue domain occurs in virtually every setup, and here's where digital 'noise' does the damage ... IOW, jitter and variants of such, can very easily, and in fact nearly always degrade the perceived quality.

 

The answer is, "best quality" digital signal handling minimises the indirect corruption of the waveform in the analogue stages.

[fas42]

20 hours ago, Blade1001 said:

But none of that DA conversion happens in the KControl, it’s all happens inside each of those those hugely vibrating and reverberant speakers, and yet it doesn’t aplead to impact sound quality?!

 

To avoid being disingenuous, I don’t actually own a KControl (I run directly into a Trinnov Anethyst), but I’m glad I didn’t buy one to be honest if it is so badly engineered that sticking a couple of chunks of overpriced “hi-fi” rubber underneath it has such an influence on its sound quality!!

 

The controller connects to the speakers, reading from the literature, via the KiiLink cable - therefore, it is part of the circuitry which forms the system; the fact that it's some distance away from the vibrating speaker is always meaningless; quite often, being not integrated with the main component makes things worse, because the link between the two parts becomes a weak spot in the whole.

 

Digital is a terrible taskmaster ... the slightest 'imperfection' in how a signal is handled somewhere can have an audible impact. It's not "bad engineering", it's that the design has to be debugged and debugged and debugged, to ensure that you "don't hear" any negative consequences. And most companies don't have the resources, or desire, to get that fiddly about things ...

[fas42]

2 minutes ago, Emlin said:

Utter rubbish. If it were true, the Internet wouldn't work. 

 

<sigh ...>

 

To repeat, from my earlier post,

 

Quote

Impacts on SQ from tweaks in the digital area are never anything as obvious as "altering the bits" - while we stay in the digital world everything will run exactly as intended, unless there is an extreme issue. However, unfortunately, at some point a conversion to the analogue domain occurs in virtually every setup, and here's where digital 'noise' does the damage ... IOW, jitter and variants of such, can very easily, and in fact nearly always degrade the perceived quality.