Are these Speakers the BEST on Planet Earth ?...

Not even close.

Oops, I dropped off the thread participation and see that Fleshler wanted a thought about the different design of the VS vs the Legacy. 

If I recall correctly, the Focus has two 12" bass drivers per side. Having handled a lot of speakers, including the VS VR IV Mk2, I do not think that typically a speaker (VonSchweikert or alternative) having twin 8" woofers will have nearly the frequency extension or output as one having a pair of 12" drivers. 

I'm sure there could be all sorts of objections from persons who argue the cabinet, build, crossovers, etc. can make the 8" drivers do wonders. In my experience, not typically. The character of the twin 12" would be fundamentally different than the 8". So, my answer to your question, would it have the "effortless and scale" of the Focus? No, it would not. Whether the speaker is more pleasing to someone is an entirely different question, which only in comparison in a system could be answered by the listener. 

@martykl 
Glad to see you posting with some frequency!

Give me a break, guys! Everything can be improved. It depends on where you want to get off the merry go round. And how competitive you’re trying to be. It’s like the early settlers. A lot got tired of traveling in covered wagons and Indians and decided to stop in the Midwest. Or not travel at all. 

You must not have heard of the Hierarchy of Sound. A modest, low cost system can be Tweaked to sound better than a moderately expensive untweaked system. And a moderately expensive system can be tweaked to sound better than a very expensive untweaked system. And a tweaked expensive system can be out of this world. You could say It’s the law of the jungle.

From a product placement standpoint @mahgister, these speakers are targeting those less likely to treat their room, and given that, they may end up superior to those much more expensive.

mahgister2,680 posts07-02-2020 12:27pm

I suspect in a well treated room, especially one customized to the speakers, one could achieve better performance from other speakers, probably even many.

My own experiment is there is no comparison between a speakers pair in a treated room and the same in a non well or non treated room....This is a fact....

''All'' and ''some''. The logic of quantifiers. Those are used to express
generality. So they can't be used as names.
The formulea are:
''For all x FX& GX''
All members of set x have the properties F and G.
If there is one x which does not satisfy those properties  then the
whole statement is not true.]

''Some x are Fx&Gx''
This statement is true if at least one x satisfy conditions F and G.
Who has examined ''all speakers'' and knows if all of them 
satisfy F and G?
What our member do is examine SOME speakers and proclame
those for the ''best''. 

I suspect in a well treated room, especially one customized to the speakers, one could achieve better performance from other speakers, probably even many.

My own experiment is there is no comparison between a speakers pair in a treated room and the same in a non well or non treated room....This is a fact....

Correction-Focus has 3-12" woofers per speaker.

@douglas_schroeder  One of the concerns about my possible purchase of the Von Schweikert VR55s was the height and number/size of the woofers. Can this speaker have great dynamic bass with 2-8" woofers, effortless and scale as my current speakers, Legacy Focus which has 6-12" woofers?  I intend to purchase the VR9MKII as it is much easier to drive, is taller and has more woofer area.   

These are not even horns...  c'mon, everyone knows that the best speakers in the word are Romy the Cat loudspeakers!! ))
http://www.goodsoundclub.com/Playback/MyPlayback.aspx

Not assumptions there Roddie, extrapolations based on what people in this thread have written.

This technology will get better in the future! 
 
Alnico Magnets in the future would be a great improvement!

So many assumptions there, Bobbie!    

Are these the best speakers ever? Unlikely, but this may be one of the better threads for showing bias and lack of knowledge in the audiophile community. I would guesstimate that most pontificating don't really even understand the technology behind the Kii. I suspect in a well treated room, especially one customized to the speakers, one could achieve better performance from other speakers, probably even many. I also suspect that for many audiophiles, the Kii, due to their lack of proper room treatments, and lack of customization of treatment, may be able to provide a superior listening experience to many high end speakers in they have heard and would put in their home assuming the drivers/electronics are capable of low distortion at intended listening levels.

Love the little digs, and I would not be throwing around terms like "Dunning Kruger" unless you have some serious technical chops in the topic of discussion. Probably best not to bring up live music and flat response either ... playback is much different from creation. Scale? ... do audiophiles not even understand how SPL is measured (when they bring in big speakers and low powered amps)?

Too busy perfecting the Kenjit Individually Tuned Speaker Systems (KITSS) that will soon make KII obsolete.

I have a soft heart. I really worry.

@Geoffkait

Yeah, that may be why.

I am getting concerned. Why is kenjit conspicuously missing here?

Multiple Krell stacks. Meh 😑 

The idea of a best speaker doesn’t make sense on the face of it (absent theoretically perfect room correction). The simple truth is that a speaker which delivers (theoretically) “perfect” performance in a 3,000 cu foot room will sound very different (imperfect) in a 15,000 cu ft room.

I heard the original, snail construction Nautilus driven by multiple Krell stacks and a custom outboard crossover at the B&W distributor in Mass.

I can’t tell you all how bored and disappointed I was with the sound that came out of them.

Honestly, the Matrix B&W before and Nautilus derived speakers after sounds much more fun and more interesting and transparent to me than the flagship Nautilus, which I have to admit to me was gorgeous as sculpture.

I agree, the B&W crazy expensive Nautilus speakers look like there from Aliens movie, but awesome except I don’t know if they use diamond tweeters now, or the old aluminum ones still. Haven’t seen them in a long time! Saw them in the 80’s. Stupid heavy too! Would need a BIG room for those suckers!! A REALLY big room!! Part snail cone, part Aliens movie.

I don’t like them for two reasons.
1) The speakers have DSP. I don’t like my music messed with by DSP in speakers.
2) I don’t like passive bass radiators at all. These speakers have two on each side of the speaker. 
  And since it seems they went out of business, oh well. 

Best speakers in my opinion were probably B&W Nautilus speakers.  Up at the top however, most are very close to each other.

Seems to be designed to act like a dipole that yearns to be an omni....*G*

It'll still come down to the space it occupies, placement, the driving equipment.....the same parameters as faced by any other speaker pair.

Reminds me of the Devailet speakers in some ways, but certainly in a more 'conventional' appearance form....

There are so many great speakers out there, is there one that is sooo much better than another?  It really comes down to the ear of the person listening, the amp driving them. The source feeding it and so on 

sharbatgula, you point out one of the outcomes of multiple smaller bass drivers; the speaker cannot - and I do mean "cannot" - sound as effortless as one with, say, multiple 15" drivers. The "tension" is due to the use of smallish bass drivers versus drivers that will with ease produce the LF. 

As regards your saying they are not the most transparent, there are many factors involved in the system's transparency, so I would have to listen to the speakers in perhaps up to 6-10 systems to know their limits in that regard. No one is able to know a speaker's absolute traits from one or two systems.

No big woofer no speaker. Just a soundbox.

Because eight 7" drivers will not begin to produce the kind of LF that superior SOTA speakers can produce.

Why would you state so? Eight 7" drivers can actually displace a lot of air while still responding much faster (less mass, less inertia) than a single or dual 12" or larger cone woofers. Another benefit is the higher breakup frequency over large woofers.

I've actually heard Kii speakers in person and while having great bass, no coloration whatsoever, they lacked effortlessness, there was some kind of tension, for lack of better words and they were not the most transparent speakers I have heard.

Perhaps to some, but definitely not to all...

I might be on to something here...

"Giant Headphones for your room...The BEST OF BOTH WORLDS"
 "Once you listen to this system for awhile...There's NO GOING BACK!"


A lot more good stuff on Kii Audio Facebook page!

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.fidelity-online.de/kii-three-und-bxt/

To answer OPs question, absolutely not, far from it, do not fall for clever marketing, the least to can do is listen and decide for yourself.
I did, I absolutely agree with the concept, active speakers when made properly are significantly better than passive ones, but the Kii's execution is very poor.

...You'd better watch John Darko's YouTube review of the KII3's, and then do yourself a favor and watch designer Bruno Potseyez YouTube clip, where he explains the technology he employed in the KII'3. They are nothing short of amazing, in every possible way. In fact, with the BXT module (which turns them into 'real' floorstanders, with a frequency response of 15Hz to 50 Khz, and with 8 drivers in each cabinet, 4 of which are phase-canceled to the other 4 (thus achieving superb time-domain behavior, and, in fact, acting like a cardioid mike), a sealed-enclosure design which enables to position them just about wherever you want (Bruno jokingly mentions that you can mount them inside a wall and they would still sound great), 6 Built-in Class D, Hypex-type amps, 6 built-in, superior DAC's, A DSP that acts both as a cross-over and controls excessive excursion of the drivers, the KII control, built of solid-aluminum, which acts both as a remote-control (with digital presets for setting the preferable listening level without having to tinker with the (LARGE AND BEAUTIFUL!) Rotary Volume control, and as a high-End Pre-Amp, which connects via a high-grade USB cable to your MAC or PC and can stream music files stored on their hard-drive(s), a USB port at the back of the speaker which allows one to connect a DOK dungle and stream music from music services like Tidal, Kobuz, Deezer, etc., and all of that at a price of $17,000/pr...Do me a favor, forget about $750,000 M9 Magicos or $130,000 YG Acoustics Anat Professional II's or Vivid Audio Giya 4 at (give or take $180,000, or top-flight models from Sonus-Faber...Get to know them: info@kiiaudio.com.      

Sounded below average to me and looks  lifestyle audio.  There is another company  with a similar claim.   Check out Ascendo Live 15. This company claims “worlds best highend loudspeakers with the superior responsiveness and dynamic performance of the highest quality drivers ”.                         

I listened to Kii speakers at the last RMAF. I didn't like them at all.

    Some Earthlings can't handle complicated issues and decisions due to their low brainpower.  Rather than taking the time to educate themselves through research and listening, they rely on their emotions to keep things simple.  This is a defective method that results in regrettable decisions, whether used for choosing speakers, a president or anything else.  

Love,
Yuck!

  Big No, i did not read anything you said   enjoy the evening 

Highend666:

I can;t imagine why anyone would waste time with a $40K pair of speakers when they could get the WAMMs for $685K :-). Of course, I'm staying with my 30-year old Cabasse Galiotes...

g

yuck
i am
yack

Only your ears will tell you if these speakers sound better than every other speaker on earth. 

 Whatever Mr Cox’s goal; he hit it out of the park, with the SVT.

Yes- a real classic.

Are these Speakers the BEST on Planet Earth ?...

     My name is Yuck! from the planet Yikes!  I'm a 7 foot bipedal very smelly cockroach creature that constantly oozes disgusting greenish yellow slime out of various bodily orifices, thus my name Yuck!  
     Our species has 8 times the number of ears and about 10 times the brainpower as you silly, stupid, puny, scrawny, backwards but delicious little earthlings.  
     Our technology and speakers are lightyears ahead of yours. Marketing a pair of speakers as 'the best on planet Earth' is considered extremely faint praise and would likely cause most of us to erupt into fits of uncontrollable giggling, which earthlings would perceive as very loud, high pitched screaming with a large dose of odd order harmonics.
   You pathetic, dim-witted, worthless little earthlings don't have a clue.

Love,
Yuck!

I think everyone here needs to peel off a couple tabs of mr natural take a nice long evening walk and then come back and explain facts vs reality, science vs science fiction, etc. dsp after sound leaves the box is available to everyone and if you have roon digital eq can be applied b4 the amplifier. The advantages dsp speakers from d&d, kii, meridian and all the professional models offer me is consistent sound room to room. Active xovers, time and phase control and tuning (voicing) done without affecting sensitivity. The dsp manufactures also have they’re own ideas of what’s best so their products will be different, but unlike passive speakers if you like a dsp speaker and bring it home it will probably sound like it did in the demo, something I never experienced with passive speakers.

  Come on! There is no "best," objectively speaking. 

And here I thought I was doing at least one thing, in my life, that was, "normal".      ie: https://www.quora.com/What-are-guitar-string-frequencies                 Whatever Mr Cox’s goal; he hit it out of the park, with the SVT.

Hm. Sounds like you have a baritone guitar. That has low E at 82Hz.

FWIW the SVT amplifier was designed around hifi ideals (by Roger Cox who retired from his position as VP at Fender a few years ago), at least that's how he put it to me.