Revel Salon 2 vrs Kef 207/2


Anybody seriously compare these two speakers.
Remarkable similarities in the reviews but with such different drivers you'd think they would be very different sounding.
jls3

Showing 3 responses by irvrobinson

I listened to both (among several), and bought the Salon 2s. The 107/2s are *very* nice though. We all listen differently, in that different people focus on different aspects of the music, so preferences are natural. For speakers of this ilk source material, venue and placement are so critical; it took me a week of "inching around" the Salon 2s until the sound was right. I was actually concerned I had made the wrong choice until I found exactly the right placement.

The most unusual alternative I heard, only in a private home, was the Linkwitz Orion+. I was shocked (shocked!) :) at how competitive it was.
How do you know the Revels will have more placement issues than the KEFs? Uni-q would have little to do with it, incidentally.
I'm wondering, Egrady, if he formed that conclusion after my original post regarding my week of inching around the Revels to get the right placement. The Revels were, truth be known, more difficult to place that my previous Legacy Focus, but I suspect that the Focus was inherently easier to place because it had front and rear woofers, and back-facing rather than down-facing ports. But I'd chalk that up more to the Legacys being easy to place than the Revels being more difficult than normal.

As I mentioned previously, the KEFs and the Revels are both very, very good. There are differences between them, but they are so close to the same level of achievement that it will end up being mere personal preference for which you choose. The KEF's mid-bass, at least in my audition, definitely struck me as plumper than the Revel's, and some people might be drawn to that. On the other hand, the Revel's reproduction of cymbals still strikes me as unmatched by any speaker I've ever heard. So, because there are subtle differences, it is easy to see how an individual could develop a preference for one over the other, even though either one exceeds the performance, overall, of just about any other speaker I've ever heard.