speaker upgrade fever

@grislybutter 

I almost accidentally bought a pair of KEF Reference 1 speakers to tide me over while repairing my Quad 2905 electrostatics, which are widely recognised as very accurate speakers.  In many respects I prefer the Reference 1 - it plays a lot louder while keeping the imaging and accuracy I am used to.  I mainly play classical music and go to a lot of live concerts.  Should possibly mention that my amplifier is a Krell KSA80 class A which has huge current reserves.

Your speaker choices listing has the Reference 3 immediately under the Reference 1.  They are identical speakers except the 3 has a duplicate bass driver in a d'Appolito arrangement. The Reference 5, not in the listing, has four of the same bass drivers,

Yet speaker choices describes the Reference 1 as 3/bass+concentric and the Reference 3 as 4/bass+midwtweet+bass.

To really understand why the KEF is outstanding, have a look at the KEF White Paper REF-White-Paper-201219-LR.pdf

These aren't beercans, neither are they bookshelf speakers. I prefer them to every other speaker I have heard iincluding Sonus Faber, B&W and behemoths costing 20 times as much.

We are a kef dealer with loads of experience with themthe legacys are warmer and have similar clarity and sound staging the signatures will floor you 10k new in choice of finish  

Dave and Troy

AUDIO INTELLECT NJ

Kef and legacys dealer 

@richardbrand thanks for the feedback! I don't really understand what I missed but I admit, there are mistakes. It took me 100s of hours to download the data from terrible websites, no one ever responding to my email questions or telling me to go away. So it is working progress. 

I did not call them beercans ever. I think KEF is one of the best values. 

@grislybutter 

Oh, I had not realised it was your compilation! I assumed it was from a technical publication.

You are not the one who called them beercans, neither did you call them bookshelf speakers.  I have difficulty linking to responses to posters, especially mid-stream ...and I tend to read all posts, no matter who they might be addressed to.

I will admit that, as an electrostatic enthusiast, the Reference 1 design goes against many of my prior conceptions.  I thought boxes with parallel faces promoted standing waves.  I thought the volume under a stand-mount could be better used as cabinet volume.  I thought diffraction from cabinet edges was always a problem.  I thought you needed big drivers to move lots of air.  Most of all, I hated non-coincident drivers because of the cancellation effects off-axis.

The KEF white paper addresses these issues in ways I still find fascinating. For example, any cutout in the baffle can act as a diffraction point, so KEF designd the bass drivers to be as physically flat as possible in the plane of the baffle, to minimise diffraction of the coincident tweeter / midrange.  Who would have thought ...

I’ve a fair bit of seat time setting up two systems now with Mimas ( which is like all Jim White designs ) a very robust but neutral product …it is not bright. Both systems used the Treo CT which has a fantastic tweeter - reasonably flat to 30 khz. For your budget used you can get Quattro CT w built in subs, 11 bands of EQ below 120 hz … and a glorius midrange… you will need to have Aesthetix or your tech high pass tge Mimas. I’m a fan of the KEF also…  they have great engineers with ears also