As a dealer selling Blades as well as lots of other great gear, this post goes out to many of you who dis the Blades.
We did the 2012 New York Audio Show with the Blades in a system with Chord Reference electronics and an Esoteric D02 dac. This was an expensive system with $30k amps a $20k preamp a $22k Dac etc.
Total system cost around $100k
I went down the hall to listen to the GTT room, YG Sonja $107k Solution amps mono blocks $80 or $120k a pair, Solution preamp $40k Solution Phono stage $40k digital was also very very expensive figured the room was around $400k.
The reality of this demo was his system was good it wasn’t better then ours for 4 times the price, Blades were $32k vs YG Sonja $107k pretty steep difference.
The issue comes down to Audio Snobbery the concept that the dedicated tiny company always builds better products than the big guys it isnt true.
If you ever read the Kef Blade technical guide which details the lengths that the Kef engineers went to reduce or eliminate distortion and advanced driver research it would boggle your mind how many unique technologies that their engineers concocted in terms of desiging and implementing the Blades.
The Kef engineers also spent around $3 million dollars on this project. Wilson in their entirty has never spent $3 million on anything, nor does Rockport, YG, or Magico. They can’t these companies yearly sales are probably less than $10 million a year companies the size of Kef are around $100-300 million a year in global sales.
I have never liked Magico always too dry, never musical. TAD reminds me of Rahido impressive resolution but not musical enough, and a tad too bright.
So the idea that a Kef or a Paradigm can’t build a speaker system which can compete with the best in the world is bunk.
A properly setup pair of Blades can easily do battle with a pair of Wilson Maxx 3 and a pair of their $110k replacement.
Only one English reviewer had the balls to say that.
The American press is too cowed by the advertising dollar to call out this fact.
The sound in our room was awesome, deep tight room shaking bass, a huge three dimensional sound stage, and remarkably clarity.
As per the gentleman who was proposing a set of YG Carmels or Magico S1 get your acoustics straight.
The mans room seems small at 12 * 23 but when you factor in the Cathedral ceiling at 16 feet you are basically doubling the amount of air the speakers have to move, so acoustically in the bass the room appears quite large.
You guys are also missing the point that the Kef Blades behave as a point source radiator and works extremely well when and if you are sitting close to the speaker. The Blades sound like a gigantic mini monitor.
They have the pin point imaging of a tiny speaker with gigantic sound stage and thrilling deep and tight bass and there dynamics are ridiculous, crank up a pair with 300-400 watts and they just get loud without strain, or distortion.
Dave owner
Audio Doctor NJ