Article: Kii THREE Loudspeaker Review

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Hey there Mitch!

 

Late to the party with this comment - great read as always. You're knocking it out of the park with no-nonsense reviews beautifully merging subjective and objective analysis with experience and education!

 

Interesting to see the convergence of numerous functions into the 1 box - DAC (AES/EBU and ADC/DAC steps when processing analogue), DSP, amplifier (Ncore), and speaker. No doubt the technology is capable of fantastic sound. (Too bad I still haven't had a chance to listen to them yet - will try to pop by Liquid Sound another time!)

 

A geeky question ? which I haven't seen the answer to elsewhere... I've read/seen advertised that the DSP processing is being performed in 40-bit floating point, but have not seen if it's listed at what samplerate the conversion is done with analogue input or what rates the internal converter handles digital input from the AES/EBU. Assuming we have a true hi-res 24/96 album fed into the device, what happens to frequencies above 22.05 or 24kHz? Does the DSP operate up there?

 

Obviously the whole notion of high samplerate audibility is suspect for Homo sapiens... But for a system like this, is there even a difference feeding anything more than 44/48kHz digital/converted analogue into it?

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On 8/24/2018 at 11:22 AM, firedog said:

Acc'd to this at Sound on Sound,  it's all done at 192k.

 

But in other places Bruno P. has said the Kii DACs work similarly to those in the Mola Mola, which is described here (where he also speculates about a future  item like the Kii for the audophile market) and here.

 

I also asked Kii if there was a "native" sampling rate of the Kii DACs that would be beneficial to feed the Kii (in other words, to upsample all input to that rate before it got to the Kii) and they said no. They said it has a proprietary ASRC that deals differently with each incoming sample rate, and the best thing to do is just let each format/sample rate come into the unit unchanged. 

 

I'm not sure how any of that lines up with the D/A, A/D, DSP supposedly being done at 192k and 40 bit floating point. 

 

 

 

Thanks for the links and information @firedog. Interesting info on the Mola Mola. Hopefully there will be some measurements ahead... Impressive claims!

 

192kHz internal processing with jitter-free SRC for the Kii Three "sounds" excellent ?.