Audiophilepure

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“Here, the news is also very good. KEF’s considerable experience with metal drivers shows here and the R500 manages to be tonally accurate and almost liquid smooth across the mid and upper registers. Listening to the 24/96 download of the Neil Cowley Trio’s Touch and Flee sees the KEF in its element. The piano is weighty and rich and, aided by the KEF’s effortless sense of three dimensionality, it becomes a believable instrument. The supporting double bass, tucked off to one side has weight and texture that allows it to sound consistently real. Switching over to vinyl and playing the same album again is arguably even better as it seems to let the KEFs flow in a way that is enormously enjoyable”

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“A lot of what distinguishes high-end speakers from merely excellent, more moderately priced speakers is the way they “separate” each instrument and vocal in recordings — creating a sound closer to the way you would hear them if you were in the studio with the artists. That was true with my “Percussion Music” CD with classical composers Edgar Varese, Henry Cowell and Charles Wuorinen’s works. The CD amply displayed the ME-1’s dynamic range stamina with the album’s all-percussion symphonies. When I (briefly) played the music loud enough to annoy my neighbors, these small speakers handled power with ease.”

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“Cymbals and massed sopranos did occasionally sound too prominent through the Sopras. Perhaps this was a consequence of an ever-so-slightly reticent upper midrange, the very thing that makes for the perfect treatment of classic rock and, perhaps, metal/grunge (just guessing). With the Sopras, the Classé Sigma Monos revealed the warts in recordings that had them, and I pretty quickly swapped them out. I better enjoyed analog amplifiers such as Parasound’s Halo A 31 and even Monoprice’s inexpensive Monolith 3: they obscured nothing, but neither did they throw anything in my face. A brief audition with the newly arrived ATi AT543nc amplifier was also promising.”