KEF LS50 Meta! Worthy of HYPE?

it's a tank hey everybody look what we got here today this one has been requested by quite a few viewers this is the kef ls50 meta version which is their latest version and one of the customers sent this in said that he wanted me to check it out that it was it was hard for him to listen to it in uh extended periods it was a little fatiguing I wanted to know if there's something we could do to it so uh let's look at the measurements first first thing we do to set it up take a measurement it measures pretty well measures really well let's look at the frequency response super smooth real smooth over wide range the top end does start to drop off a little bit though the top octave is down about 2 DB and then above about 16 or 17 K Hertz it just takes a dive now past 22k Hertz at the very top you can see it starting to come back up there may be some ringing in this Tweeter but it's above 22 karz I can't really see it all I can just see the rise start I don't know how aggressive the the ring is I see the exact same measurements in the q100s and the q150s that I've measured it it's the same driver basically so I'm seeing the same thing um same driver other than this has the meta technology on the back which we'll talk about later if we look at the off-axis response that's going off axis and since this is a coaxial it means going off axis in any direction really it looks great it looks as good as anything we've ever measured in here as far as off axis it just drops off evenly and smoothly the further you get off axis uh Spectrum Decay is pretty clean there's a few little ridges there that'll get a little bit of ringing going on there real low but overall really clean really clean and the impedance response nothing really crazy going on there other than right there at the tuning frequency of the port we can see there's a little bit of a port resonance going on and it's the port is on the back which is kind of weird it's a flared Port it's flared on both sides I don't know what's causing the resonance there but there is a little bit of Port resonance going on it may help that if it had a little more insulation don't know um binding posts were pretty decent uh I didn't see ferromagnetic material anywhere on this side I couldn't get to the other side so I don't know if they've got a nut on there that's ferrous or not but overall it looked good and then we opened it up and this thing is well built it's a tank it's solid there's no cabinet resonance so it's definitely different from the Q100 and q150s than there any of the other models for that matter in that they more aggressively braced it and it's just a big cross brace running through it and it's three quarter MDF so it wasn't expensive it's not at all expensive to put a little piece of MDF in there and it looks as if the whole cabinet is maybe MDF and painted and painted rather nicely so it's it's an inexpensive way to finish the cabinet and it looks good and this curved front baffle um is definitely functional I mean it's going to minimize the surface Reflections and keep it from sounding as if it's playing from the baffle it's going to even it out and make it sound as if it's more transparent so then we dug inside the crossover for this thing is built on two boards and the boards are kind of sandwiched over in the corners around the bracing so it's almost impossible to get to I mean we could get to it and you could take them out you could work on it you could do some stuff to it but not easily they didn't make this thing to service if you want to do upgrades on this thing have at it man it's going to be tough um if I were doing anything I wouldn't recommend changing the overall design I thought well maybe lift the Tweeter up a little bit but there was no resistors in the Tweeter circuit Tweeter circuit had one poly cap and one air core inductor and I've had word from a few guys online that said that was a Clarity cap that they put on the Tweeter so it wasn't just a cheap polycap it was a pretty decent poly cap so it should have reasonable Clarity in the top end I mean it's not like they put some kind of super cap on there but they didn't put a junk cap on there it's not a cheap a Chinese imported cab they use a Clarity cap it's pretty nice now that being said then you get to the woofer circuit and I think man why did they cheap out on the woofer circuit the woofer circuit is got some cheesy Parts in there granted there's a couple little air core inductors there's also an iron core inductor two sand cast resistors and the capacitors are electrolytic capacitors so look come on guys so if you're listening to these and you notice a somewhat veiled sound or the vocals are a little bit soft or subdued or sound like they're kind of playing through a wet rag kind of feel like not a real open or Lively Natural Body in the vocals that's where I would point and as far as that's probably the culprit and I say that because those type of parts produce that type of sound it's not a matter of let's go and change it out and listen to it and compare a bunch of stuff and listen to it with one capitalist do it the other cap and decide is it no these are these are somewhat absolutes some of those lower priced budget Parts have those particular sound characteristics they used them in this woofer circuit they didn't in the Tweeter circuit the Tweeter circuit it only has two parts which is great and so not a lot of single path and they use pretty good parts so the Tweeter Clarity should be pretty nice and it should be slightly better than some of the other models that they offer which may use some inexpensive Chinese poly Caps or it may just have some electrolytic caps in it so there's some good there's some bad but what do I tell the customer you know this is a tough one there's there's definitely some things left on the table you could definitely go and improve the parts quality especially in that woofer circuit you could take a that Tweeter circuit you could put a sauna cap there on it bring that Clarity up you could bypass it with a copper full cap bring the clarity up even more you could replace the the mining post with two connectors increase the clarity a little a little more there but man this one's going to be tough to work on it's going to be really tough you'd almost have to mount the whole crossover external because I don't think you can get it back in there once you disassemble or take out those other boards I think they're done there's some little plastic stands off standoffs that they pop on and as soon as you cut those to get it off or squeeze those down enough to get it off I don't think you'll get it back on and on the woofer circuit there's not enough room left on that board for any really high quality Parts you start putting real 16 gauge inductors in there and it's going to fill the whole board it'll just fill all that up immediately and I just don't think you'll even get it into the box so as good as this little speaker may be and a lot of people have really praised it as being a pretty good sound on a little monitor it's probably stuck where it is unless you want to go through a lot of trouble or a lot of effort to try and bring that level up if you're looking for more than what this is going to give you and there's certainly a lot of speakers out there that fit in that category you might want to just step up to another speaker it's one of those that I'd say it's just not worth it and it's not bad to begin with I mean for casual listening and and you're not too critical of how the music sounds I mean don't expect this to be a five thousand dollar you know kill all mini monitor it's not for the price point that they sell it for it's probably pretty decent for the price point but it's no killer and to make it into something more than it is it's going to take some work so I just don't recommend it that's my thoughts on this little model um I think the customer is eyeballing some of our hiring kits so he's just going to step right up into one of our kits and not really try to spend any more money on it so I know you guys asked again a lot about it hope that gives you a little good constructive feedback on where this thing kind of lands and we're going to talk more about the meta technology which is really a way of diffusing the back way with the Tweeter it's a way of absorbing it a little bit or diffusing it rather than absorbing it and I'm going to do a whole series on that and we're going to talk about the the pros and cons to doing things like that the way this was done versus more simple ways that it could have been done and we're going to do that in another episode that's it for this one just a short one and I'll see you guys in the next video and thanks for watching

Channel: GR-Research

Views: 201,637

Keywords: Tuesday Tech Talk, audiophile, hifi, loudspeaker, fullrange driver, comb filtering, GR-Research, Danny Richie, crossover design, measurements, best loudspeakers, tube amplifier, preamplifier, diy speakers, audiophile speakers, audiophile music, amplifier, best voice, audiophiles, high end, baffle step loss, open baffle, fast bass, subwoofers, line source, drivers, low distortion, the room, speaker upgrade, audiophile loudspeakers, crossovers, DIY Audio, soundstage, ls50, meta, kef, hype

Id: 0tzQeYyD4O8

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2022