Interesting design the Kii Three
A review here - pdf download available in English.
http://kiiaudio.com/en/press.html
I found the "StudioMagazin" review a good read over coffee this morning.
from the review.
A review here - pdf download available in English.
http://kiiaudio.com/en/press.html
I found the "StudioMagazin" review a good read over coffee this morning.
from the review.
The Kii Three was designed to provide extremely deep bass from a relatively small and surprisingly lightweight cabinet. An additional objective was to create dispersion characteristics equalling those of a flush mount monitor, notwithstanding the relatively narrow baffle. The smaller the loudspeaker front, the earlier (higher in frequency) the speakers dispersion will become omnidirectional – an unwelcome property in loudspeakers that studio planners go to great lengths to avoid.
Room acoustics issues appear predominantly at low frequencies and when trying to achieve precise stereo imaging. While the latter can be optimized by comparatively simple measures, taming the low frequencies takes a much larger effort (see also our special edition Room Acoustics and Studio Design, June 2016). This is where the Kii Three comes in, creating a consistent cardioid sound field all the way down to just short of 50Hz, then gradually becoming omnidirectional below this point. With the Speaker placed close to a wall and thus at an acoustically benign boundary distance, the resulting level increase below 50Hz can easily be treated in a compensation filter.
All this complex signal processing costs the user dearly – not financially, but by introducing a latency of 90 milliseconds which would disqualify the Kii Three for any kind of real time work in the control room. To avoid this, the monitor can be set to a low latency mode by pushing a button marked “P/R“ on the back panel, reducing the latency to only a handful of DSP samples plus the DAC latency for a total value in the one millisecond range. The low latency mode replaces the highly complex low frequency filters by simplified algorithms, leaving the sonic properties of the monitor basically unchanged. The only tradeoff is reduced precision at low frequencies, but at a very reasonable magnitude with only small impact on aural evaluation.