Article: KEF LS60 Wireless HiFi System

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Wow. Looks nice and I bet it will sound nice. 

If someone liked the bookshelf model but thought it wasn't enough or needed a sub, this could be the ticket. 

Considering that it's a complete system (just add source, which can even be an online streaming platform) this is a reasonably priced system.

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55 minutes ago, botrytis said:

Well, hopefully will not be as expensive as other Audiophile brands, like Linn.

$7000 a pair. Very reasonable for what it is.

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2 minutes ago, ShawnC said:

I for one have been waiting for these. A couple of there matching subs, about $12,000 all together.

Yeah, I thought of that. A 2.2 system like that would probably be killer.

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27 minutes ago, bobfa said:

Many Thanks!  I am working on it!  

 

Be very interesting to hear your impressions vs. Kii Three, your present speakers, and D&D.

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1 hour ago, mav52 said:

They are a little thin, I really wonder about stability.

I think they took care of that with the base. And they weigh 69 pounds/31.2 kg apiece, so they won't tip over so easily.

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1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

You make some good points about failure and service with a system like this. 
 

Sure. I have a system with actives and needing to send it back is an issue, although I'm sure it doesn't happen that often.

Two comments:

Work with a dealer and see if the dealer will commit to a loaner in case of failure - either the same model or a different one. 

The other option is to have a secondary setup. Not as expensive or as good, but at least something to hold you over in case of a failure. 

I have a second set of much cheaper....actives. 

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2 hours ago, GrahamJohnMiles said:

with a claimed response down in the high 26 to 35khz  range why the hell anyone would need separate subs is beyond me

I can think of a couple of reasons:

One, the 26hz is with a significant roll off.

Two, if you want to play music with very low bass as a fairly loud volume, the system bass limiter will kick in. The system is designed that way at higher volumes (loud, but not deafening) to protect the relatively small woofers that produce low bass with very long woofer extension. It will still sound ok, and probably good enough for most, but won't quite cut it for those that want top notch, natural sounding low bass reproduction at volume. For most music at most volumes it will sound fine. 

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2 hours ago, GrahamJohnMiles said:

Not sure if they felt guilty, but they had the grace to repair and ship back free of charge.

From what I've read with several similar cases online, KEF is very liberal with their interpretation of the warranty for the actives - to the benefit of the consumer.

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1 hour ago, jeffhenning said:

Hey, just talking about my issues. My first pair of active speakers were Paradigm LCR-450's that I bought in around 1998. They worked great until until one of the speakers went a bit wobbly around 2013.

 

Don't know exactly what the problem was, but I think something about the active crossover between the mid/tweeter went south in one speaker.

 

Since I am also a musician and recording engineer, I had my system set up to use the IK Multimedia Audyssey ARC plug-in on my Mac. What ever was going on was fixed via DSP for music listening using Audio Hijack.

 

On music, especially if it was mono, you could easily hear something was wrong. Using the DSP, it corrected the speaker disparity.

 

When listening to movies or TV in surround, for the most part, you really couldn't discern the problem. Funny how that works.

 

Anyway, KEF makes really fantastic speakers. The electronics that come with them? Not sold on that yet.

 

Just so you know:

1: Again, even two LS50 Wireless speakers with four Rythmik L12 servo subs is about $1,500 cheaper and will give you a drastically better & more potent low end. Sorry that they take up about 3 more square feet of your rooms footage.

 

2: I don't have four L12 servo subs because I want a shit ton of bass... I want whatever bass that is to be reproduced to be rendered as cleanly as possible. Having 4 subs means that none of them is ever straining to recreate lowest notes.

 

3: I am a bass player and I, from time to time, play bass through my home theater system via a Roland GT-10B from a S/PDIF cable. Just for fun, I up mix the stereo output to full surround via DTS. I have a particular patch called "The Voice of God" on the GT-10B. It's two pitch shifters (one above, one below), some distortion and a ton of time-based effects. It lives up to the name.

 

As good as the LS60 is, it could never compete with my system. Hey, again, not saying that it's not a really fine speaker, but that you can have better for less money.

 

At least it's not like that crap from Wilson Audio where they take about $6-8K worth of speakers that you can buy from Madisound and then want you to pay $200-500K because they came up with a "magical box" in which they house them.

 

Most audiophiles are morons. There is nothing magical about your personal ability to hear...anything.

 

Understand science and you will see how many charlatans their are in the hi-fi industry.

 

And none of that matters. In the end it all comes down to personal taste and preference. You prefer a certain sound and are okay with 4 subs in the room. Other people don't want that. And they aren't looking for the same sound you are. Doesn't mean you are right and they are wrong. Means they have differerent taste/preferences and a different idea about what they want in a room.

 

The fact that you are a bass player is also irrelevant. Do you think every bass player in the world would prefer your setup? 

 

I can guarantee you they wouldn't. I've seen Ron Carter's system, publicized in Stereophile. Nothing like yours. But hell, what would he know about sound or the sound of bass? I suggest you get in touch with him and lecture him about what kind of system he should have instead of the one he's spent time putting together, that he thinks reproduces sound like he hears it when playing. 

 

Oh, and you had a problem with some active speakers after 15 years? Wow, what crap they must have been. Electronics not inside that speaker would of course, obviously been better and lasted longer.....or not. If you couldn't get them repaired, that's a shame. But that's going to be an issue with 15 year old equipment, especially audiophile stuff, which tends to be made by small companies. But Paradigm is still around, btw. So are you saying they couldn't be fixed, or that you didn't go to the trouble? 

One of the advantages of buying actives from a company like KEF is that there's a pretty good likelihood they'll be around in the future and will service the speakers if they need it. 

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2 hours ago, ednaz said:

Anyone who doubts that peoples' hearing abilities vary significantly is just flat out belligerently ignorant. Why would hearing be any different than every other of the human senses? There are people who can taste a wine and tell you the grape variety, year, region, and often the vineyard of origin, where most people would be fortunate to get the grape variety right. (And some can tell a red from a white, and that's it.) No surprise - the number of taste buds on tongues, and ratio of different types of buds, varies wildly across the population, and the willingness to practice and learn to attune those taste buds varies even more wildly. There are people whose reaction times are 4-5x faster than the average person. In one part of their body, but not in the others. Some people can smell mercaptan, others can't. Genetics. Some people can smell a perfume and name all the scent components. Most of us just know there's perfume in the room. There are people who can look at a color patch and tell you which Pantone number they're looking at. 

 

And as to hearing. Some people have perfect pitch. I don't, I only have relative pitch. (You can look those up, Mr. Henning. But you won't.) With a little more ability - I can tell if an orchestra or musician is tuned to A 440 or A 432. My guess is Mr. Henning would not be capable of that. I can also tell you what kind of metal bell is on a trumpet or trombone when I hear it played. A lot of people can do that though, it's why you see whole orchestral brass sections playing identical instruments. It makes me a bit crazy hearing an orchestra that isn't that conscientious, the blend just isn't there. (Although if they're mixing red brass and silver bells, much harder to pick apart.) Many musicians can tell the sound differences between one piece and two piece bell construction, and have strong preferences. And you, Mr. Henning? At my advanced years, I can still hear the goddamn mosquito repellers that some businesses put up.

 

Some of the differences are genetic, some are epigenetic, some are talents (you're born with), some are skills (you can develop.)

And yet there's Mr. Henning, who holds out his inability to hear distinctions in sound waves as the superior definition of human auditory abilities. One wonders if he thinks his taste buds, eyes, nose, and central nervous system are also the acme of human achievement.

And none of that means that you aren't susceptible to expectation bias when you listen to and compare audio equipment. So even if you have the best hearing, you can fool yourself.

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1 hour ago, ednaz said:

Nope. And every person is susceptible to a hundred kinds of bias including bias about other peoples' bias. Which happens to be the most common bias - assuming that everyone else on the planet is no different from you.

 

If we weren't all significantly different from each other, we'd have been exterminated as a species through the inexorable process of inbreeding.
 

I've had a blast taking people who believed scientifically unsupported baloney like " peripheral vision perceives color" or "the way to respond fastest to a stimulus is to have it in the center of your vision" into tests of their personal ego-centric biases, and capturing the results on video. 

 

The whole madness of "anything I don't agree with has got to be manipulation by controlling powers" or "anything I don't agree with can't be true because I define human consciousness" or "anyone other than me is wrong because {fill in the blank reason} is the basis of why millions of people believe in election fraud (it's impossible anybody could disagree with my opinions), with zero tangible evidence, despite nearly $100MM being spent on looking for fraud and finding nothing.

 

As a species, we're on the decline. Because of ego driven ignorance.

Didn't say anything like that. It's all your projection of your ideas onto me. So the ego driven ignorance is yours.

 

There have been massive amounts of experiments on human perception, including audio perception. No one's immune from expectaton bias in how their brain interprets data.

 

Saying everyone has expectation bias is not saying everyone has the same expectation bias or in the same amounts. Is that so hard for you to understand?

It's clear from many scientific experiments that humans are all susceptible to various kinds of expectation bias in various amounts. If you deny that, it's you who has the problem with science. Or perhaps just an inablility to see subtlety and the very variation you claim to be triumphing?