Although it does not affect the sound on axis on the speakers.”Īn interesting dilemma faced the designers at KEF Loudspeakers in 2012 when they were asked to trecreat' a modern version of the 'legendary' LS3/5A (initially as a limited edition) to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. It also contributes to a more convincing released sound image. There will be a lot of trade-offs! 8)Īnother stereo error artifact that Ingvar Oehman fixes in the pi60(s) is the height projection. You have to see how it should behave from the whole sound image from the front (perhaps at least +/-30 degrees) and make a balance. In addition, it is not so easy to just check the difference between center-panned sounds and real straight-ahead sounds. Although it is still a problem because we often use relative tone curve differences to determine directions in the soundscape. It's probably less of a problem because there you have quite a lot of agreement with where the sound should give the illusion of coming from and where it really comes from It will still be right s a s. When you play sounds that are completely panned either to the right or to the left, you get a deviation that is infected by the compensation to make it sound right on mono sound. Now this is not entirely without complications. Then you will get a more 'living' sound image. Then you can simply make sure that you adjust the direct tone curve from the speaker so that the sound is included as if it had come straight from the front. If you combine the sound from the left and right speakers and measure at the ear, due to the above differences, the tone curve will not be the same as if the sound had come straight through. The sound from the left speaker, however, will lack a bit of treble. What happens? The sound from the right speaker will contain more high-frequency sounds in that it plays more 'straight into' the ear. The situation is symmetrical so we only need to check one ear. If you let the singer sing through two speakers, as the picture shows, we will not have the same tone curve deviation in front of the outer ears. That's how it should be when we listen to mono sound. We can have this deviation as a reference. If we think that she is standing and singing for real in front of listeners, we will have a tone curve deviation right in front of the outer ear, which is primarily due to the shape of the head. ”For the simplest case, we can imagine that we are playing a mono signal (something that is panned in the middle, eg a singer). In a stereo setup - I doubt it will sound any better, it probably gonna be the opposite. One can always try using a digital PEQ ( such as the very good one in WiiM pro ) to make the frequency response flat for the ls50 Meta. A better source and amplifier with two ls50 meta might outperform the ls60.Ĥ. Because of this knowledge - dont throw out everything you have been learning about ”source first” as a false statement. I compared those with a simpler passive speaker with a better sounding amplifier, and the simpler speaker sounded better.ģ. This was something that I didnt believe in when I had my SAM monitors. However - the amplifiers inside ls60 are probably slightly compromised in quality, so If one uses the ls50 meta with a Hypex ncore poweramp or better, it probably gonna sound better because of the higher quality of the amplifier. But is it better sounding than the ls50 Meta? Its a very good sounding speaker, no doubt. Its easy to draw wrong conclusions from the measurements from Erins measurements of the ls60 = that has a flatter frequency response. The loudspeaker has apparently been tuned by ear in a stereo setup.Ģ. In Erins measurements, we can see that Kef has done some of this. That needs some stereo system compensation between 1-2 kHz ( +1,5 dB ) and between 2,5 - 4 kHz ( - 1.5 dB ), and a slightly elevated peak at about 5 kHz. In the real world, you always listen to two stereo speakers. The Harman score is slightly misleading.ġ. Click to expand.Yes thats exactly the point.

Kef ls50 meta frequency response