… you may not have noticed a new Kii on the block. And it creates quite a stir, because nothing is ordinary about it.
Starting with the looks: it has drivers all around the enclosure! The four bass drivers are located two on the back and one on each of the side walls, but none on the front (what the???). The front baffle sports a tweeter and a mid range speakers only, plus two LED indicators at the bottom – hardly a substitute for a 15″ woofer, some would say.
If that’s not radical enough, then let’s take a look at the electronic components. Yes, amps have been built into speakers before. DACs too. But six amps of 250W each, and six DACs per speaker – that’s a bit more radical. And what’s the point, you may ask?
Well, here we have a bookshelf size speaker covering the whole audible frequency range with ruler flat frequency response (20Hz to 25kHz +/- 0.5dB!), equally flat phase response (resulting in superb imaging), cardioidal directivity down to below 80 Hz (works miracles in respect to speaker placement), so no wonder a radical approach was necessary.
The pros and cons of complexity
The Kii THREE are seriously complex devices. They are as far from an ordinary speaker as a jet fighter is from a kite.
All the technology packed in these boxes is working on squeezing the every last ounce of performance from the speakers. But the price is that there’s quite a lot that can go wrong.
And sometimes it does. My brand new set came from the shop with polarity of the speakers being out of sync between the left and right channels. For the life of me I couldn’t get a coherent stereo image. Initially I thought this must be due to a challenging placement I had for them and kept tweaking the speaker positions to no avail. Once I realised this could be a polarity issue I have corrected it with DSP and… bingo! The imaging came together out of nowhere, razor sharp and the placement turned out not to be a problem at all. But I still had a problem with the speakers – the only difference was that I have diagnosed it and had a prosthetic solution to get me by.
I sent an email to my dealer and he requested that I bring the speakers back to the store, where using the Kii Control (which I don’t have) he can access the advanced settings and correct the polarity. And that’s what I did. The speakers have aligned themselves as soon as the Control was plugged in and everything was sweet. However after coming back home, one of the speakers was outputting no sound at all. Things have gone from bad to worse!
After notifying the dealer about the issue he consulted the manufacturer regarding the issue and offered to come to my place to fix it. And this is where it gets really interesting: on a Saturday morning the kind gentlemen from Sonic Purity in Melbourne knocked at my door. We hooked up with a technician in Germany who (at 11pm his time) has connected to the speakers over internet to diagnose the problem and while at it install the latest firmware. To my relief, the operation was a success.
As it turned out, the problem was caused by unplugging the Kii Control while set to one of the Control inputs. From that point the speaker remembered the last input and expected the signal to come from there. Should we have set the input back to the speaker XLR before disconnecting the Control, the problem would not have happened.
The sound of… sound
Just before Kii THREE I had a setup which I considered quite detailed and revealing. It consisted of the Lynx Hilo converter, Metrum Menuet DAC feeding Violectric V281 headphone amp which doubled as a preamp for Yamaha HS-8 studio monitors, aided by the Presonus Temblor T-10 active sub. Very dynamic sound with plenty of detail, perhaps erring a bit on the too revealing side, sometimes exposing things I didn’t want to hear. Out of this setup only the Hilo remains in my chain as USB to AES/EBU converter and volume control.
Kii THREE brought even more clarity, but somehow it is not harsh, unpleasant or piercing – it feels right and natural. The presentation is a bit unusual though. The bass is there both in quality and quantity, however it can be heard but not as much felt. It doesn’t have this visceral gut pounding effect that is usually associated with low frequency high energy sounds. Is that bothersome? That’s a very individual thing and probably won’t be to everyone’s liking. But it has its benefits: these are the best behaved speakers I have ever heard in terms of placement. Just put them wherever it suits you and they’ll sound amazing, minimizing the impact of room modes, near wall placement etc. And the sound does not propagate as much to the adjoining rooms.
Another quite amazing quality is how they respond to equalizing, should you ever want it. You can for example boost bass by 15dB and the mids or highs are not clouded, distorted or affected in any other way: there’s more bass and that’s it.
What else can I say?
I have tried several albums quite susceptible to sibilance, and they were playing beautifully.
There’s plenty of slam across the frequency range, but it’s not tiring or shouty. Not even when playing very loud.
With no signal the speakers are dead silent – a rare thing among powered monitors.
If you think that serious bass requires 18″ woofers then play some Bassotronics on Kii THREE. The sub-bass is punchy and amazingly clean and goes deep down to infrasonic frequencies. Using a generator I have seen them flex down to 5 Hz!
With my previous setup (HS-8+T10) there were occasional “magic moments”, when I felt like the artist is in the room with me. With the Kii THREE it’s happening nearly every time, unless a recording is really badly produced. Better quality recordings sound really sublime – goosebumps territory!
The source conundrum
Kii THREE are sold as standalone monitors, with the Kii CONTROL “remote” being an optional $2,000 add-on. When deciding on the actual configuration, the following should be considered:
The speakers themselves take either balanced XLR analogue signal, or digital S/PDIF through the same connector acting as an AES/EBU input. There are switches next to the XLR sockets which allow selection of the input mode.
In case of AES/EBU, it is plugged in to only one of the speakers and the other is fed the signal through custom connection which uses standard Ethernet cables (however the signals are not Ethernet compliant and should not be connected to your home LAN). The dilemma here is as follows: If you use the analog inputs, the signal will be first converted to digital (to undergo some DSP magic like equalization, phase alignment and wave shaping). That’s not ideal, especially if the source was digital in the first place, and the signal was just converted to analogue by your favorite DAC.
If on the other hand you skip the D/A conversion and use AES/EBU, you will have to use digital attenuation to control the volume , and potentially loose some signal resolution.
This is where the CONTROL comes handy: aside providing additional digital inputs (USB, Toslink and Coax), it also provides a volume control which does not degrade the digital signal. There are other benefits of CONTROL too: it provides access to some more setup and tuning options, which otherwise are not accessible.
In practice however the digital attenuation disadvantages can be largely overcome by driving the speakers with 24-bit signal, which provides enough headroom and removes any traces of introducing digital noise. And the A/D converter used for the XLR input is very transparent and does excellent job, retaining most of the analogue magic that many vinyl diehards crave so much.
Some random remarks
The black panels surrounding side drivers and top of the enclosure are made of anodized brushed aluminium. They act as radiators for all the in-built amps and the power supply. The enclosure can get quite hot, although never exceeding safe to touch temperatures.
There are two operating modes: linear phase response (which introduces about 85 ms latency) and fast phase response (with 5 ms latency, but forgoing the signal linearity). Modes can be toggled by the P/R buttons on the back of the enclosure, but there is no indication which mode is in use. For casual listening the linear mode is much preferred as it maximises the resolution of stereo imaging. For movies though the fast mode may be preferable, as it does lip syncing much better (although most modern equipment provides control of that, if you’re inclined to plow through the menu labyrinths.
Don’t be fooled by the 6x250W specs: Kii THREE are NOT 1500 W speakers and will never use this power all at once. In fact the power usage is rated at maximum of 200W.
Most active speakers provide some sort of input sensitivity or amplifier gain adjustment. Kii THREE don’t have that. On the other hand, there are controls for tone adjustment and placement adjustment (which feels like just a bass attenuator, but perhaps it does something to control the wave shaping algorithms too).
The Boundary (placement) and Contour (equalisation) controls also lack proper indication of the position. Looking at them you never know if they are in the 0 degree or 180 degree position.
The accessories provided are limited to the power cables and a very long Ethernet cable (10 m?), plus some brochures and printed reviews. Packaging is rather anonymous in plain cardboard boxes, but there are two boxes for each speaker, one inside the other, separated by bubble wrap. The speakers themselves are wrapped in synthetic cloth bags and braced inside the box with a stiff foam frame.
CONTROL supports DSD64 and DSD128 over USB. We know very little about the internal design, but the rather obvious expectation is that the DSD support is just for compatibility, as internally the speakers rely on DSP, which is pretty much exclusive to PCM. So my guess is that the DSD is internally converted to PCM.
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