Article: Kii THREE Loudspeaker Review

[MikeJazz]

Thanks for the excelente analysis.

I was so excited to experience the kii that  recently went to the local dealer to have a listen.

This must have been one of the most disappoint experiences I had. Maybe in part due to the previous hype surrounding the kii.

 

I hear some of the well know qualities: spacious sound, dinamic, revealing, time coherent, yes.

 

But I also heard a speaker with some issues on presenting tone. Tone was not rich, voices did not sound natural, but a bit harsh. On the end it was a bit disappointing hear that the speaker was lacking on the tone department. Tone is very important to get me involved in the music. 

 

The quest to find a replacement for my QUAD ESL 2805 continues...

[MikeJazz]

12 hours ago, mitchco said:

 

Mike, I understand. It could be that the Kii's were not set up properly, as it does make quite a big difference. Not only setting up the boundary eq, but taming the high frequency energy output. Note I had to dial in a -4 dB shelf at 3 kHz for the tone to sound neutral as per the Harman's research. That's a lot of high frequency reduction! Given that you said the voices sound a bit harsh is a tell take sign to me that the speakers were not set up properly. With the -4 dB shelf at 3 kHz, they never sounded harsh to my ears, no matter how loud I turned them up or what the music content was.

 

Those QUAD ESL 2805 speakers are very nice. Looking over at Stereophiles measurements, I can see that they already have the built-in downward tilt in the frequency response. In fact, looking at JA's measurements, it is almost exactly a -10 dB tilt from 20 Hz to 20 kHz that the folks from Harman (and I) suggest as neutral sound reproduction with good timbre (i.e. tone quality). Good choice man! I hope you get a 2nd chance to listen again, but able to dial down the treble energy as "out of the box", as with virtually every speaker I demo, there is way to much high frequency output, which for sure skews the tonal balance. Especially with the Kii's, as they are very uncoloured plus having too much high frequency energy output would not be a pleasant listening experience.

Thanks Mitchco, that's very useful information to me. Sure I can try to have a second listen one day, because the Kii score high in other departments to me (simplicity of the solution, fun factor, dinamics..).