Incoming - Pair of KEF Reference 1 Meta Speakers

Hi everybody,

Ha, love the exchanges/threads - fun stuff! Glad I got this one started - as it's my first thread on the Audiogon forum...

And thanks to everyone for jumping in and offering some sound advice! 

Will try and summarize input below on all the above:

1. Common theme: "Ditch the Mac Mini". I chewed on this one myself. My prior benchmark(s) or latest benchmark with some a/b like testing was my crappy laptop (with Audirvana loaded on it) against my Eversolo A-6 Gen 2 Masters edition (both having a hard wired ethernet cable). I tried nearly all use cases with my old laptop against the Ever solo. Hands down (and has others concur) the laptop playing Audirvana bested the Eversolo. My buddy gave me his old Mac Mini1 (dead quiet). I loaded Audirvana on it, and play directly off the Mac Mini (via a little mini monitor and keyboard) into my Bryston BDA-3 DAC. Results: Much more clear, transient, crisp, tighter dynmaics, bass, etc..Audirvana is of course compatible with Quboz, Tidal, etc..So I just connect Tidal, Quboz etc in the Audirvana app and it's always awesome. It also freed up a few bucks because I sold my Ever Solo streamer. 

 

HOWEVER, I would be happy to try another streamer? Perhaps the Eversolo was the weak link there - streamer wise? I have tried Tidal, Quboz on other streamers as well alongside playing Audirvana through its Apple app over my home's same internet wi-fi into my hard wired Eversolo streamer and it just never sounded/sounds as good as playing it directly from the Mac Mini/Audirvana laoded app (also ethernet hard wired) into my DAC. 

2. Agree - we are still trying to baseline our new home here and actually in-progress of working with GIK Acoustics now on further optimizing my room treatment- diffusers/room treatment options - solid point!!

3. Pine Tree Audio - I have their speaker cables, XLR cables and power cords. All bested even my higher end Kimber Kable (speaker cable wise) and former Audio Quest XLR cable runs of which always sound much more veil like in comparison to Pine Tree's cables - at a near fraction of the cost. Pine Tree's dollar to performance ratio is simply super good. I find their speaker cables to be the most neutral, transient, dynamic, etc..Jesse, the owner is an awesome guy as well and incredibly knowledgeable on all things audio. He can customize nearly anything one might want. 

4. Why KEF? I couldn't figure out how to attach pictures of our current listening room, etc..But in short, I'm hoping the KEF's spit a wider sweet spot and overall dispersion so those sitting on both our front and center loveseat (sweet spot) and/or the chairs on the side of the loveseat (more off-axis-like) can enjoy things better as well. We tend to do a ton of listening waaay off axis such as mult-tasking around the house etc...and hoping the KEF's will sound better throughout and no matter where you are in the house when the stereo is going kind of thing. Will keep folks posted once they arrive here soon! Bonus: They look bad ass - design factor wise. Afterall, we have a small rancher and our listening room is our formal Living Room. So good decor even when the jams aren't playing. 

5. Much agreed: One change at a time. I will get a pulse on things using on my current electronics. Prior to thinking of any further changes. I agree - something tells me my Van Alstine M750 monoblocks might bring out clearer, more crisp/tighter dymanics than my MC-452 will! BUT - looking forward to playing here soon :)

 

Thanks all for the fun chat. This is sooo much better and a rather healthy distraction versus what's occurring in the news daily. Funny how we all can spend hours on end doing audio chatter on the daily :)

Cheers

PS - doing a copy/paste dump from my reply/exchange with GIK Acoustics today...I will digest it all later...

 

Thanks for writing in and filling out an acoustic advice form. In a living room like this, when we're just looking to treat general reflections around the room to gain more vocal intelligibility and clarity throughout the room, we need to treat as low of a frequency that is going to be present in the room. In this case as we're dealing with a living room we'll keep it to a general improvement as we likely don't have the space to build it out ideally as a dedicated listening space or the aesthetic committee on our side so I'll try and split the difference here.

 

Let's get some general knowledge under your belt so we can get you up to speed on what we think about in terms of acoustics and the amount of treatment we'd need to fix the problem, later on I'll give you some recommendations toward the bottom, and we can follow up if need be. We'll start with coverage area and thickness, the two sides of the spectrum that we need to marry to get the smoothest results in your room.

 

Understanding Coverage Area for the Amount of Surface Area in the Room

Most people picture acoustic treatment like this: slap a few foam panels on the walls, maybe one on the ceiling, and the room suddenly sounds “professional.” The truth is far less glamorous—and far more important: it’s not about how many panels you own… it’s about how much of your room’s surface area actually gets treated.

 

That percentage is called coverage, and it is the single biggest factor that decides whether your room sounds clear, punchy, and balanced… or thin, boxy, and fatiguing.

 

Real-World Coverage Guidelines (What the Pros Actually Use)

• 10–15 % coverage Typical for offices, restaurants, conference rooms, or open-plan living rooms. - this is probably where you'll end up

  • Goal: knock down the worst flutter echoes and make speech more intelligible. You still hear the “room,” but it’s no longer annoying.

• 15–20 % coverage (starting point) Common minimum for podcast rooms, YouTube studios, and bedrooms used for content creation

  • Goal: clean up early reflections so voices sound present and intelligible without sounding like you’re in a bathroom.

• 20–25 % coverage (starting point) Home theaters, project studios, and smaller control rooms, listening rooms

  • Goal: tighten bass, improve stereo imaging, and give music or movies real weight and clarity and impact. - ideally we'd start here for a listening room

• 30–40 % coverage (and sometimes more) Critical listening rooms, mastering studios, high-end home theaters

  • Goal: maximum clarity, effortless stereo imaging, deep and controlled low end, and that “weight” and “punch” people chase for years.

Does 10 % vs 40 % really sound that different?

Yes—dramatically. Here’s why, in plain English:

Every time sound leaves your speakers or mouth, it immediately hits the walls, floor, and ceiling. Those surfaces reflect the sound straight back at you a few milliseconds later. Those delayed reflections do three no so great things:

1. They smear transients: Kick drums and snare hits lose their “snap” and turn into a blur.

2. They create comb filtering: Certain frequencies get louder, others disappear, so voices sound nasal or thin and bass sounds boomy in one seat and weak in another.

3. They mask quiet details: Reverb tails, vocal breath, room tone, and subtle effects get buried under a wash of reflections.

Acoustic panels (absorption) and diffusers eat those reflections before they can come back and cause trouble. The more surface area you treat, the fewer problem reflections survive.

 

Think of it like lighting:

• 10 % coverage = a dimly lit restaurant (romantic, but you can’t read the menu).

• 40 % coverage = a brightly lit studio (every detail is visible, nothing is hidden).

A Simple Way to Visualize It

What we'd need to hit these metrics when we add up all the surface area in the room:

 

10% is about the equivalent of 12 panels, which would likely be a hard sell in this room... but to make a noticeable difference this is what we're looking for. Now we can do that in a combination of different ways, but keep that number in mind.

 

 

The Bottom Line Most People Miss

Great sound isn’t created by the gear in the room. It’s created by what you remove from the room—namely, uncontrolled reflections.

You can have $50,000 monitors, but if they’re firing into an untreated box, they will sound worse than $500 monitors in a properly treated space.

 

Coverage percentage is the difference between:

• “This is a noticeable difference” (10–15 %)

• “Wow, that actually sounds good” (20–25 %)

• “This sounds like a record” (30–40 %+)

So when someone tells you “you don’t need that many panels,” ask them what coverage percentage they’re aiming for and what specific acoustic goals they’re trying to hit. The numbers above have been proven in thousands of rooms over decades. They’re not guesses; they’re the recipe.

 

Treat enough surface area and the clarity, presence, punch, weight, and smoothness show up on their own. Treat too little, and no EQ plugin on earth can fix it.

 

What's the deal with panel thickness?

Thicker is always better as you'll get a smoother response throughout the room, vs using thinner panels. We can use 2" thin panels that will attenuate down to 400hz if we're looking to control general reflections, like in an office setting, or needing to preserve ceiling height for low ceilings, otherwise for anything critical listening we'll start at 4" of absorption to attenuate down to about 100hz (generally the lowest frequency for the human vocal range) and thicker to get the smoothest results. This is very important, and too many people that don't contact an acoustic designer use thin panels thinking they do the same thing, and very likely they have a nice looking but very unbalanced room such as a lot of the wooden slat "acoustic panels" you see nowadays (they're much too think to absorb much of anything below 1khz at best (mid range and up), and will leave the room boomy and dull as too much thin treatment will over-absorb the high end and under-absorb the low end..... don't believe everything you see on YouTube.

 

The goal here is balance across the frequency spectrum to lessen decay times (amount of time that frequencies linger around in the room) to bring clarity to the room. Let's dive into the different thicknesses as a rule of thumb on what we should be looking for here ideally.

The ear brain didn’t evolve with 40% broad band absorbing environments…. 

Best keep your expectations realistic on pursuit of a wider sweet spot... You will degrade the primary sweet spot if you try to get more than 1 sweet spot, in general.

The better executed concentric driver designs (tad, etc) are more conducive for the wide spot, but, if you get nitpicky...such as being able to physically "walk around"/trace that solid virtual center image of a singer, etc...it will almost always fall back to 1 sweetspot.

Why KEF? I couldn't figure out how to attach pictures of our current listening room, etc..But in short, I'm hoping the KEF's spit a wider sweet spot and overall dispersion so those sitting on both our front and center loveseat (sweet spot) and/or the chairs on the

@tomic601 

You are imo going to want some significant investment in diffusion

That is an interesting perspective.  Have you much experience with virtual-point-source speakers like the KEF Reference 1s?

If your ear/brain has had enough time to adjust, these speakers throw a huge soundstage and have a very large sweet ’area’ to match.  This is because the direct sound is coherent, as are reflections.  I bought a pair secondhand as stop-gaps while fixing my Quad ESL-2905s but in many respects, including volume, they are better than the Quads, and that’s saying something.  I’d estimate the soundstage is about triple the speaker spacing on well recorded orchestral music!

I have no special wall treatments - just a reasonably thick carpet and curtains.  My front wall is a stud wall faced in western red cedar.

For historical reasons I use a single 18" subwoofer from Velodyne and it works fine.

I bought my Reference 1s after auditioning with an M6 pre-amp feeding McIntosh amplification but I do not remember the model.  There was a lot of quiescent noise with a Kiseki LOMC cartridge in a Holbo air-bearing turntable though.