I get to hear the Kii Threes

Thanks to a giant favour from a new friend, I finally get to hear the Kii Threes…

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A couple of Sundays ago, a large van arrived at my house containing two Kii Threes and their monumentally heavy stands, plus a pair of Linkwkitz LX Minis with subwoofers along with their knowledgeable owner, John. It was our intention to spend the day comparing speakers.

We first set up the Kiis to compare against my ‘Keph’ speakers and to do this, we had to ‘interleave’ the speaker pairs with slightly less stereo separation and symmetry than ideal, perhaps:

Setting up went remarkably smoothly, and we soon had the Kiis running off Tidal on a laptop while the Kephs were fed with Spotify Premium – most tracks seemed to be available from both services. The Kiis are elegant in the simplicity of cabling and the lack of extraneous boxes.

John had set up the Kiis with his preferred downwards frequency response slope that starts at 3kHz and ended at 4dB down (at 22 Khz?). I can’t say what significance this might have had on our listening experiment.

The original idea was to match the SPLs using pink noise and a sound level meter. This we did, but didn’t maintain such discipline for long. We were listening rather louder than I would normally, but this was inevitable because of the Kii’s amazing volume capabilities.

The bottom line is that the Kiis are spectacular! The main differences for me were that the Kiis were ‘smoother’ and the bass went deeper, and they seemed to show up the ‘ambience’ in many recordings more than the Kephs – more about that later. An SPL meter revealed that what sounded like equal volume required, in fact, a measurably higher SPL from the Kephs. Could this be our hearing registering the direct sound, but the Kiis’ superior dispersion abilities resulting in less reverberant sound – ignored by our conscious hearing but no doubt obscuring detail? Or possibly an artefact of their different frequency responses? We didn’t really have time to investigate this any further.

When standing a long way from both sets of speakers at the back of the room, the Kephs appeared to be emphasising the midrange more, and at the moment of changeover between speakers that contrast didn’t sound good; with a certain classical piano track, at the moment of changeover the Kephs seemed to render the sound* of the piano kind of ‘plinky plonk’ or toy-like compared to the Kiis – but then after about 10 seconds I got used to it. Without the Kiis to compare against I would have said my Kephs sounded quite good..! But the Kiis were clearly doing something very special.

I did try some ad hoc modifications of the Keph driver gains, baffle step slopes and so on, and we maybe got a bit closer in that regard. But I forgot about the -4dB slope that had been applied to the Kiis, and if I had thought about it, I already had an option in the Kephs’ config file for doing just that. But really, I wish I had had the courage of my convictions and left the the frequency response ‘as is’.

Ultimately, I think that we were running into the very reason why the Kiis are designed the way they are: to resemble a big speaker. As the blurb for the Kii says:

“The THREE’s ability to direct bass is comparable to, but much better controlled than that of a traditional speaker several meters wide.”

It’s about avoiding reflections that blur bass detail, but as R.E. Greene explains, it’s also about frequency response:

“What is true of the mini-monitor, that it cannot be EQed to sound right, is also true of narrow-front floor-standers. They sound too midrange-oriented because of the nature of the room sound. This is something about the geometry of the design. It cannot be substantially altered by crossover decisions and so on.

A conventional small speaker (and the Kephs are relatively small) cannot be equalised to give a flat direct sound and flat room sound. It has to be a compromise and as I described before, I apply baffle step compensation to help bridge this discrepancy between the direct and ambient frequency balances. The results are, so I thought, rather acceptable, but the compromise shows up against a speaker with more controlled dispersion.

This must always be a factor in the sound of conventional speakers unless sitting very close to them. I do believe Bruno Putzeys when he says that large speakers (or those that cleverly simulate largeness) will always sound different from small ones. It would be interesting also to have compared the Kiis against my bigger speakers whose baffle step is almost an octave lower.

However, there was another difference that bothered me (with the usual sighted listening caveats) and this was ‘focus’. With the Kiis I heard lots of ‘ambience’ – almost ‘surround sound’ – but I didn’t hear a super-precise image. When the Kephs were substituted I heard a sudden snap into focus, and everything moved to mainly between and beyond the speakers. The sound was less ‘smooth’ but it was, to me, more focused.

And this is a question I still have about the Kiis and other speakers that utilise anti-phase. I see the animations on the Kii web site that show how the rear drivers cancel out the sound that would otherwise go behind the speaker. To do this, the rear drivers must deliver a measured quantity of accurately-timed anti-phase. This is a brilliant idea.

My question is, though: how complete is this cancellation if you partially obscure one of the side drivers (-with another speaker in this case)? I do wonder if I was hearing the results of anti-phase escaping into the room and messing up the imaging because of the way we had arranged the speakers – along with a mildly (possibly imaginary!) uncomfortable sensation in my ears and head.

To a frequency response measurements oriented person, it doesn’t matter whether sound is anti-, or in-, phase; it is just ‘frequency response material’ that gets chucked into bins and totted up at the end of the measurement. If it is delayed and reflected then in graphs its effects appear no different from the visually-chaotic results of all room reflections; this is the usual argument against phase accuracy in forum discussions. “How can phase matter if it is shifted arbitrarily by reflections in the room, anyway?”.

However, to the person who acknowledges that the time domain is also important, anti-phase is a problem. If human hearing has the ability to separate direct sound from room sound, it is dependent on being able to register the time-delayed similarity between direct and reflected sound. If the reflected sound is inverted relative to the direct, that similarity is not as strong (we are talking about transients more than steady state waveforms). In fact, the reflected sound may partially register as a different source of sound.

Anti-phase is surely going to sound weird – and indeed it does, as anyone who has heard stereo speakers wired out of phase will attest. Where the listener registers in-phase stereo speakers as producing a precise image located at one point in space, out-of-phase speakers produce an image located nowhere and/or everywhere. The makers of pseudo-surround sound systems such as Q-Sound exploit this in order to create images that are not restricted to between the stereo speakers. This may be a factor in the open baffle sound that some people like (but I don’t!).

So I would suggest that allowing anti-phase to bounce around the room is going to produce unpredictable results. This is one reason why I am suspicious of any speaker that releases the backwave of the driver cone into the room. The more this can be attenuated (and its bandwidth restricted) the better.

With the Kiis, was I hearing the effect of less-than-perfect cancellation because of the obscuring of one of the side drivers? Or imagining it? Most people who have heard the Kiis remark on the precise imaging, so I fear that we managed to change something with our layout. Despite the Kiis’ very clever dispersion control system which supposedly makes them placement-independent, does it pay to be a little careful of placement and/or symmetry, anyway? For it not to matter would be miraculous, I would say.

In a recent review of the Kiis (not available online without a subscription), Martin Colloms says that with the Kiis he heard:

“…sometimes larger than life, out-of-the-box imaging”

I wonder if that could be a trace of what I was hearing..? Or maybe he means it as a pure compliment. In the same review he describes how the cardioid cancellation mechanism extends as far as 1kHz, so it is not just a bass phenomenon.

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Next, John set up his DIY Linkwitz LX Mini speakers (which look very attractive, being based on vertical plastic tubes with small ‘pods’ on top), as well as their compact-but-heavy subwoofers. These were fed with analogue signals from a Raspberry-Pi based streamer and, again, sounded excellent. They also seek to control dispersion, in this case by purely acoustic means – that I don’t yet understand. And they may also dabble a bit in backwave anti-phase.

If I had any criticism, it was that the very top end wasn’t quite as good as a conventional tweeter..? But it might be my imagination and expectation bias. Also, our ears and critical faculties were pretty far gone by that point…

Really, we had three systems all of which, to me, sounded good in isolation – but with the Kiis revealing their superior performance at the point of changeover. There were certainly moments of confusion when I didn’t know which system was operating and only the changeover gave the game away. I think all three systems were much better than what you often get at audio shows.

What we didn’t have were any problems with distortion, hum, noise. In these respects, all three systems just worked. The biggest source of any such problem was a laptop fan which kicked in sometimes when running Tidal.

There were lots of things we didn’t do. We didn’t try the speakers in different positions; we didn’t try different toe-in angles; we didn’t make frequency response measurements and do things in a particularly scientific way; we listened at pretty high volume and didn’t have the self-control to listen at lower volumes – which might have been more appropriate for some of the classical music. The room was ‘as it comes’: 6 x 3.4 x 2.4m, carpeted, plaster walls and ceiling, and floor-to-ceiling windows behind the speakers with a few boxes and bits of furniture lying about.

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So my conclusion is that I have heard the Kiis and am highly impressed, but there might possibly be an extra level of focus and integrity I have yet to experience. I never got to the point where I could listen through the speakers rather than to them, but I am sure that this will happen at some point.

In the meantime I am having to learn to love my Kephs again – which actually isn’t too hard without the Kiis in the same room showing them up!

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Footnotes:

*Since writing that paragraph I have found a mention of possibly that very phenomenon:

“…even a brief comparison with a real piano, say, will reveal the midrange-orientation of the narrow- front wide radiators.”

Room correction. What are we trying to achieve?

The short version…

The recent availability of DSP is leading some people to assume that speakers are, and have always been, ‘wrong’ unless EQ’ed to invert the room’s acoustics.

In fact, our audio ancestors didn’t get it wrong. Only a neutral speaker is ‘right’, and the acoustics of an average room are an enhancement to the sound. If we don’t like the sound of the room, we must change the room – not the sound from the speaker.

DSP gives us the tools to build a more neutral speaker than ever before.

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There are endless discussions about room correction, and many different commercial products and methods. Some people seem to like certain results while others find them a little strange-sounding.

I am not actually sure what it is that people are trying to achieve. I can’t help but think that if someone feels the need for room correction, they have yet to hear a system that sounds so good that they wouldn’t dream of messing it up with another layer of their own ‘EQ’.

Another possibility is that they are making an unwarranted assumption based on the fact that there are large objective differences between the recorded waveform and what reaches the listener’s ears in a real room. That must mean that no matter how good it sounds, there’s an error. It could sound even better, right?

No.

A reviewer of the Kii Three found that that particularly neutral speaker sounded perfect straight out of the box.

“…the traditional kind of subjective analysis we speaker reviewers default to — describing the tonal balance and making a judgement about the competence of a monitor’s basic frequency response — is somehow rendered a little pointless with the Kii Three. It sounds so transparent and creates such fundamentally believable audio that thoughts of ‘dull’ or ‘bright’ seem somehow superfluous.”

The Kii Three does, however, offer a number of preset “contour” EQ options. As I shall describe later, I think that a variation on this is all that is required to refine the sound of any well-designed neutral speaker in most rooms.

A distinction is often made between correction of the bass and higher frequencies. If the room is large, and furnished copiously, there may be no problem to solve in either case, and this is the ideal situation. But some bass manipulation may be needed in many rooms. At a minimum, the person with sealed woofers needs the roll-off at the bottom end to start at about the right frequency for the room. This, in itself, is a form of ‘room correction’.

The controversial aspect is the question of whether we need ‘correction’ higher up. Should it be applied routinely (some people think so), as sparingly as possible, or not at all? And if people do hear an improvement, is that because the system is inherently correcting less-than-ideal speakers rather than the room?

Here are some ways of looking at the issue.

1. Single room reflections give us echoes, while multiple reflections (of reflections) give us reverberation. Performing a frequency response measurement with a neutral transducer and analysing the result may show a non-flat FR at the listening position even when smoothed fairly heavily. This is just an aspect of statistics, and of the geometry and absorptivity of the various surfaces in the room. Some reflections will result in some frequencies summing in phase, to some extent, and others not.
2. Experience tells us that we “hear through” the room to any acoustic source. Our hearing appears not to be just a frequency response analyser, but can separate direct sound from reflections. This is not a fanciful idea: adaptive software can learn to do the same thing.

The idea is also supported by some of the great and the good in audio.

Floyd Toole:

“…we humans manage to compensate for many of the temporal and timbral variations contributed by rooms and hear “through” them to appreciate certain essential qualities of sound sources within these spaces.”

Or Meridian’s Bob Stuart:

“Our brains are able to separate direct sound from the reverberation…”

3. If we EQ the FR of the speaker to obtain a flat in-room measured response including the reflections in the measurement, it seems that we will subsequently “hear through” the reflections to a strangely-EQ’ed direct sound. It will, nevertheless measure ‘perfectly’.
4. Audio orthodoxy maintains that humans are supremely insensitive to phase distortion, and this is often compounded with the argument that room reflections completely swamp phase information so it is not worth worrying about. This denies the possibility that we “hear through” the room. Listening tests in the past that purportedly demonstrated our inability to hear the effects of phase have often been based on mono only, and didn’t compare distorted with undistorted phase examples – merely distorted versus differently distorted, played on the then available equipment.
5. Contradicting (4), audiophiles traditionally fear crossovers because the phase shifts inherent in (non-DSP) crossovers are, they say, always audible. DSP, on the other hand, allows us to create crossovers without any phase shift i.e. they are ‘transparent’.
6. At a minimum, speaker drivers on their baffles should not ‘fight’ each other through the crossover – their phases should be aligned. The appropriate delays then ensure that they are not ‘fighting’ at the listener’s position. The next level in performance is to ensure that their phases are flat at all frequencies i.e. linear phase. The result of this is the recorded waveform preserved in both frequency and time.
7. Intuitively, genuine stereo imaging is likely to be a function of phase and timing. Preserving that phase and timing should probably be something we logically try to do. We could ‘second guess’ how it works using traditional rules of thumb, deciding not to preserve the phase and timing, but if it is effectively cost-free to do it, why not do it anyway?
8. A ‘perfect’ response from many speaker/room combinations can be guaranteed using DSP (deconvolution with the impulse response at that point, not just playing with a graphic equaliser). Unfortunately, it will only be valid for a single point in space, and moving 1mm from there will produce errors and unquantifiable sonic effects. Additionally, ‘perfect’ refers to the ‘anechoic chamber’ version of the recording, which may not be what most people are trying to achieve even if the measurements they think they seek mean precisely that.
9. Room effects such as (moderate) reverberation are a major difference between listening with speakers versus headphones, and are actually desirable. ‘Room correction’ would be a bad thing if it literally removed the room from the sound. If that is the case, what exactly do we think ‘room correction’ is for?
10. Even if the drivers are neutral (in an anechoic situation) and crossed over perfectly on axis, they are of finite size and mounted in a box or on a baffle that has a physical size and shape. This produces certain frequency-dependent dispersion characteristics which give different measured, and subjective, results in different rooms. Some questions are:

• • is this dispersion characteristic a ‘room effect’ or a ‘speaker effect’. Or both?
  • is there a simple objective measurement that says one result is better than any other?
  • is there just one ‘right’ result and all others are ‘wrong’?

11. Should room correction attempt to correct the speaker as well? Or should we, in fact, only correct the speaker? Or just the room? If so, how would we separate room from speaker in our measurements? Can they, in fact, be separated?

I think there is a formula that gives good results. It says:

• Don’t rely on feedback from in-room measurements, but do ‘neutralise’ the speaker at the most elemental levels first. At every stage, go for the most neutral (and locally correctable) option e.g. sealed woofers, DSP-based linear phase crossovers with time alignment delays.
• Simply avoid configurations that are going to give inherently weird results: two-way speakers, bass reflex, many types of passive crossover etc. These may not even be partially correctable in any meaningful way.
• Phase and time alignment are sacrosanct. This is the secret ingredient. You can play with minor changes to the ‘tone colour’ separately, but your direct sound must always maintain the recording’s phase and time alignment. This implies that FIR filters must be used, thus allowing frequency response to be modified independently of phase.
• By all means do all the good stuff regarding speaker placement, room treatments (the room is always ‘valid’), and avoiding objects and asymmetry around the speakers themselves.
• Notionally, I propose that we wish to correct the speaker not the room. However, we are faced with a room and non-neutral speaker that are intertwined due to the fact that the speaker has multiple drivers of finite size and a physical presence (as opposed to being a point source with uniform directivity at all frequencies). The artefacts resulting from this are room-dependent and can never really be ‘corrected’ unambiguously. Luckily, a smooth EQ curve can make the sound subjectively near enough to transparent. To obtain this curve, predict the baffle step correction for each driver using modelling or standard formula with some some trial-and-error regarding the depth required (4, 5, 6 dB?); this is a very smooth EQ curve. Or, possibly (I haven’t done this myself), make many FR measurements around the listening area, smooth and average them together, and partially invert this, again without altering phase and time alignment.
• You are hearing the direct sound, plus separately-perceived ‘room ambience’. If you don’t like the sound of the ambience, you must change the room, not the direct sound.

Is there any scientific evidence for these assertions? No more nor less than any other ‘room correction’ technique – just logical deduction based on subjective experience. Really, it is just a case of thinking about what we hear as we move around and between rooms, compared to what the simple in-room FR measurements show. Why do real musicians not need ‘correction’ when they play in different venues? Do we really want ‘headphone sound’ when listening in rooms? (If so, just wear headphones or sit closer to smaller speakers).

This does not say that neutral drivers alone are sufficient to guarantee good sound – I have observed that this is not the case. A simple baffle step correction applied to frequency response (but leaving phase and timing intact) can greatly improve the sound of a real loudspeaker in a room without affecting how sharply-imaged and dynamic it sounds. I surmise that frequency response can be regarded as ‘colour’ (or “chrominance” in old school video speak), independent of the ‘detail’ (or “luminance”) of phase and timing. We can work towards a frequency response that compensates for the combination of room and speaker dispersion effects to give the right subjective ‘colour’ as long as we maintain accurate phase and timing of the direct sound.

We are not (necessarily) trying to flatten the in-room FR as measured at the listener’s position – the EQ we apply is very smooth and shallow – but the result will still be perceived as a flat FR. Many (most?) existing speakers inherently have this EQ built in whether their creators applied it deliberately, or via the ‘voicing’ they did when setting the speaker up for use in an average room.

In conclusion, the summary is this:

• Humans “hear through” the room to the direct sound; the room is perceived as a separate ‘ambience’. Because of this, ‘no correction’ really is the correct strategy.
• Simply flattening the FR at the listening position via EQ of the speaker output is likely to result in ‘peculiar’ perceived sound, even if the in-room measurements purport to say otherwise.
• Speakers have to be as rigorously neutral as possible by design, rather than attempting to correct them by ‘global feedback’ in the room.
• Final refinement is a speaker/room-dependent, smooth, shallow EQ curve that doesn’t touch phase and timing – only FIR filters can do this.

[Last updated 05/04/17]

The Secret Life of the Signal

Some people actually think of stereo imaging as a “parlour trick” that is very low on the list of desirable attributes that an audio system should have. They ‘rationalise’ this by saying that in the majority of recordings, any stereo image is an artificial illusion, created by the recording engineer either deliberately or by accident; it does not accurately represent the live event – because there may not even have been a single live event. So how can it matter if it is reproduced by the playback system or not? Perhaps it is even best to suppress it: muddle it up with some inter-channel crosstalk like vinyl does, or even listen in mono.

At the top of the list of desirable attributes for a hi-fi system, most audiophiles would put “timbre”, “tonality”, low distortion, clean reproduction at high volumes, dynamics, deep bass. All of these qualities can be experienced with a mono signal and a single speaker – in fact in the Harman Corporation’s training for listening, monophonic reproduction is recommended for when performing listening tests.

Because their effects are not so obvious in mono, phase and timing are regarded by many as supremely unimportant. I quote one industry luminary:

Time domain does not enter my vocabulary…

Sound is colour?

We know that our eyes respond to detail and colour in different ways. In the early days of colour TV (analogue) it was found that the signal could be broadcast within practical bandwidths because the colour (chrominance) information could be be sent at lower resolution than the detail (luminance).

There is, perhaps, a parallel in hearing, too: that humans have separate mechanisms for responding to sound in the frequency and time domains. But the conventional hi-fi industry’s implicit view is that we only hear in the frequency domain: all the main measurements are in the frequency domain, and steady state signals are regarded as equivalent to real music. A speaker’s overall response to phase and timing is ignored almost totally or, at best, regarded as a secondary issue.

I think that this is symptomatic of an idea that pervades hi-fi: that the signal is ‘colour’. Sure, it varies as the music is playing, but the exact nature of that variation is almost incidental; secondary in comparison to the importance of the accurate reproduction of colour, and that in testing, all that matters is whether a uniform colour is accurately reproduced.

There has, nevertheless, been some belated lip service paid to the importance of timing, with the hype around MQA (still usually being played over speakers with huge timing errors!), and a number of passive speakers with sloping front baffles for time alignment. Taken to its logical conclusion, we have these:

Their creator says, though:

It’s nice if you have phase coherence, but it is not necessary

So they still fall short of the “straight wire with gain” ideal. It still says that the signal is something we can take liberties with, not aspiring to absolute accuracy in the detail as long as we get a good neutral white and a deep black, and all uniform (‘steady state’) colours reproduced with the correct shading. It says that we understand the signal and it is trivial. Time alignment by moving the drivers backwards and forwards is an easy gimmick, so we can go that far, however.

Another Dimension

I think that with DSP-corrected drivers and crossovers, we are beginning to find that there is another dimension to the common or garden stereo signal; one that has been viewed as a secondary effect until now. Whether created accidentally or not, the majority of recordings contain ‘imaging’ that is so clear that it gives us access to the music in a way we were not aware of. It allows us to ‘walk around’ the scene in which the recording was made. If it is a composite, multitrack recording, it may not be a real scene that ever existed, but the individual elements are each small scenes in themselves, and they become clearly delineated. It is ‘compelling’.

I can do no better than quote a brand new review of the Kii Three written by a professional audio engineer, that echoes something I was saying a couple of weeks ago: imaging is not just a ‘trick’, but improves the separation of the acoustic sources in a way that goes beyond the traditional attributes of low distortion & colouration.

I think he also echoes something I said about believable imaging giving the speaker a ‘free pass’ in terms of measurements. As in my DIY post, he says that the speaker sounds so transparent and believable that there is no point in going any further in criticising the sound. A suggestion, perhaps, that conventional ‘in-room’ measurements and ‘room correction’, are shown up as the red herrings they are if a system sets out to be genuinely neutral by design, at source.

Firstly, the traditional kind of subjective analysis we speaker reviewers default to — describing the tonal balance and making a judgement about the competence of a monitor’s basic frequency response — is somehow rendered a little pointless with the Kii Three. It sounds so transparent and creates such fundamentally believable audio that thoughts of ‘dull’ or ‘bright’ seem somehow superfluous.

… it is dominated by such a sense of realistic clarity, imaging, dynamics and detail that you begin almost to forget that there’s a speaker between you and the music.

…I’ve never heard anything anywhere near as adept at separating the elements of a mix and revealing exactly what is going on. I found myself endlessly fascinated, in particular, by the way the Kii Three presents vocals within a mix and ruthlessly reveals how good the performance was and how the voice was subsequently treated (or mistreated). Performance idiosyncrasies, microphone character, room sound, compression effects, reverb and delay techniques and pitch-correction artifacts that I’d never noticed before became blindingly obvious — it was addictive.

…One of the joys of auditioning new audio gear, especially speakers, is that I occasionally get to rediscover CDs or mixes that I thought I knew intimately. I can honestly say that with the Kii Three, every time I played some old familiar material I heard something significant in the way it performs…

…Low-latency mode …switch[es] off the system phase correction. It makes for a fascinating listening experience. …the change of phase response is clearly audible. The monitor loses a little of its imaging ability and overall precision in low-latency mode so that things sound a little less ‘together’.

“The Kii Three is one of the finest speakers I’ve ever heard and undoubtedly the best I’ve ever had the privilege and pleasure of using in my own home.”

Kii Three Review

Just saw this review of the Kii Threes by mastering engineer Bob Macc. He seems rather pleased with them:

…everything is just tight, accurate, and not smeared in time or pressed-sounding. Kick drums on these speakers are ridiculous in their tightness and accuracy. Acoustic and electric basses are the very definition of the word ‘articulate’. The time-coherency extends, of course, across the whole spectrum. Transients are, well, transients.

The imaging on these speakers is also absolutely unbelievable, in all dimensions. The front to back depth is unreal; room information is conveyed incredibly well. You’re there. In fact it might be the depth that astounded me more than anything else. The stereo image is absolutely enormous, involving, and everything sounds real. Drums pop out like drums do (or don’t, if they don’t). The main acoustic guitar in Holland and Habichuela’s ‘Hands’ was unbelievably real. The sound is huge, and absolutely pristine in all regards.

They are incredibly revealing – I heard things in tracks I know extremely well that I have never heard before. I heard micro-movement inside tracks from compression/sidechaining that I’ve never heard before. I heard mistakes in work by very famous engineers in tracks I’ve listened to a million times. I heard mistakes in my own work (tiny ones, I promise!) that I absolutely would not have allowed to pass had I heard them previously. That kind of says it all.

The whole time though, you’re thinking; ‘how do those tiny little speakers make all that sound?!’. With eyes closed and a good-sounding track playing, the room is absolutely full of sound. When you open your eyes, it’s almost as if the illusion is destroyed – there’s simply no way those little things can produce all that sound. But they do, and they do it easily and effortlessly.

I really am going to have to get in touch with the chap at Purité Audio (who posted this review on HiFi Wigwam) and see if he’ll let me have a listen…

Does hi-fi end here?

Reports are coming in that hi-fi may, after a century of development, have actually reached its logical conclusion. It is beginning to look as though the Kii Three may be the technology beyond which it simply wouldn’t be worth going, for the vast majority of people. If so, this is quite a significant moment.

Everything up to this point has been a flawed, intermediate step.

It all started in the 19^th century with the stunningly simple observation that sound is nothing more than variations of air pressure and that these can be picked up by a diaphragm and reproduced by another diaphragm. The hi-fi story has been one of how best to store the information encoded within the vibrations, and how to get the vibrations back out into the world at some time later.

First, we had purely mechanical systems which had to contend with the imbalance between the tiny amount of energy that can be picked up when making a recording versus the large amount of energy that is needed to play the recording back.

Then, with the introduction of electronics into the equation, the path towards the truly linear system was opened up. We had recording on magnetic tape, distributed to the listeners via vinyl LPs. Amplification with valves, then transistors, Class A, AB and now Class D. Horn speakers, multi-way speakers, direct radiators, acoustic suspension, and detours into panel speakers, electrostatics and even plasma. Interestingly, active crossovers are not new: they were used in cinemas in the 1930s, and there was at least one well-heeled enthusiast using them in a domestic system in the 1950s.

A major disruption occurred with the development of digital audio in the 1980s which, at a stroke, propelled performance in terms of noise, distortion and linearity to the point of practical perfection and slashed the size, weight and price of audio storage and playback equipment.

(At this point, ‘high end’ audio as a hobby left the rails and, for many, became an exercise in masochism, superstition and nostalgia).

The next part of the puzzle was solved when computing power became available. Using a computer it is possible to perform digital signal processing (DSP), allowing precise tailoring of crossovers and EQ, and for the characteristics of mechanical transducers (the speaker drivers in their boxes) to be modified.

The linear system

Now, all the pieces were in place to build a linear reproduction system using the following building blocks:

• Digital storage of stereo or multichannel recording
• DSP to process the signal for crossover, time alignment between drivers, driver amplitude and phase correction, EQ, woofer distortion correction using voice coil current or motion feedback
• One DAC per driver
• One solid state amplifier per driver
• Loudspeaker comprising several dynamic drivers each allocated to a narrow frequency range, including sealed woofer whose bass can, if necessary, be extended using DSP EQ.

This is all perfectly realisable at low cost using physically small electronics. The advent of Class D amplification makes it even smaller and cheaper. Such a system is virtually noiseless, has extremely low levels of distortion and covers the entire human hearing frequency range.

The final part of the puzzle

There has been a lag in the acceptance of such systems even though they are spectacularly good. The recent development of a system to tackle directly the issue of the speaker’s interaction with the room at bass frequencies may be the final part of the puzzle that means these systems take off. I think the Kii Three is the first speaker to do this using DSP, followed closely behind by the huge and expensive Beolab 90.

There is some confusion over why DSP-based ‘room correction’ is needed, and what it is capable of. Although the room appears to mangle the signal terribly in terms of frequency response and phase when measured, the listener hears the direct sound from the speaker first, and an average room just adds agreeable ‘ambience’ that blends the immediate surroundings with the recording and helps to cement a convincing illusion of ‘being there’. Trying to ‘correct’ the effects of the room will make the system sound worse.

The one area where genuine problems may occur, however, is in the bass, and people attempt to solve this with DSP (not very successfully), and with room treatments (not particularly effective for the bass). The Kii Three and Beolab 90 both take the approach of using extra drivers driven by DSP to make the speaker more directional at low frequencies by cancelling out some of the almost omnidirectional bass that comes from the main driver, at the sides and rear. This effectively provides the same directionality as a huge baffle, but from a compact speaker.

Intuitively, it seems obvious that in a highly reflective, echoey room, this technique would improve the clarity of what was heard. It would also tackle problems of speaker placement near walls and corners. The amount of bass bouncing around the room is being reduced at source, rather than trying to catch it afterwards with bass traps etc. The result, apparently, is spectacularly good.

By all accounts, the Kii Three is a compact, good looking speaker with a moderate (OK, not outrageous) price, that simply disappears acoustically, leaving the music as a solid 3D image. It is loud enough and goes deep enough to satisfy the vast majority of people. No other equipment is needed other than a digital source, which could be a PC, streamer or network.

The search is, apparently, over. While it would be possible to build a bigger system, with bigger drivers, higher powered amps and so on, this would just be scaling the same fundamental design. This has already been done in the form of the Beolab 90. The system could be further scaled to provide more channels than just stereo, and more precise control of dispersion in the vertical as well as the horizontal – if anyone thought it necessary.

Conclusion

In the end, it turned out that the ‘objectivists’ were basically right: you really do just need perfect linearity to build the perfect hi-fi system (but you also have to have accuracy in the time domain, which most audio objectivists ignore).

According to reviews, and based on my own experience of not completely dissimilar DIY systems, the Kii Three is the only hi-fi system anyone will ever need. Valves, vinyl and passive crossovers seem positively quaint in comparison; ‘high tech’ passive speaker systems seem almost perverse. No doubt the Kii Three will be copied, and cheaper versions will appear, but there is no need to fundamentally change the design from now on. It should be game over for other forms of hi-fi. (It won’t be, of course!)

Kii Three

Here is a review (translated from German) of the new Kii Three active DSP speaker.

…a family friendly compact speaker that scores far higher on all significant audiophile fronts than any we’ve had here at AUDIO in our thirty plus year history.

Designed in concept by Bruno Putzeys of Grimm LS1 fame and incorporating some of his highly-renowned Class D amplifiers, it accomplishes the feat of controlling the dispersion of the bass using clever DSP and multiple bass drivers. This means it is not choosy about placement in corners and near walls, and it sounds like a much larger speaker. In common with other advanced speakers, the combination of DSP, active amplification, and correct time domain behaviour produces astonishing results.

For the Three we can suffice with the shortest ever listening report. Its essence is one of superb accuracy that grabs one immediately and releases no-one from its thrall. It takes only a scant few seconds for the listener to grasp what sets this speaker apart from classical speaker and amp combinations. It sounds as pure as crystal, it’s spatially and dynamically right on the mark and its magnificent authenticity alone will make customers sign the order form well before the dealer has managed to produce the compulsory cup of coffee and line up the leaflets

It is compact, but the bass reaches down to 20 Hz through the use of EQ and, as a result, much greater power is required to drive it than a larger box. However, this is handled by the internal power amps so the user need not worry about this. For many people the size will be much more acceptable than conventional humongous boxes (like my speakers).

Basically, it looks as though the Kii Three could be the best speaker ever made (I am not exaggerating) and costs about £6500. And of course it includes DACs and amps so no external gear other than a laptop or other digital source is necessary to make a complete system. A future option will offer wi fi.

On the same magazine cover is an image of the ‘new’ Harbeth 40.2 which costs much more. As the Kii Three reviewer says:

Wild times are afoot for Kii Audio’s competitors.