Bo I have to agree with some of the other poster, you make specious claims without even hinting at what your process is.
We have been setting up high performance systems for 30 years, there are really very few setup gurus out there and those that are out there generally work on similar protocalls.
We were taught speaker setup by David Wilson, there are those who use lasers to align the speakers, and plumb bobs for leveling and rake angle, there is acousitcal tunning, vibration reduction, emi and rfi reduction, power conditioning and maximizing a systems setup by making sure the components are working well together along with cabling.
As per Monitor vs Kef the Kef Ref Fives are awesome loudspeakers, we have a pair on display and they are nothing short of amazing sounding, they are extremely lifelike and they throw a huge well focused soundstage, they have very tight bass and great dynamics.
We also sell the Legacy line that uses German made Heil drivers, the Heil tweeters are soft sounding, as they are basically flexible myler film which has been folded many times, Heil drivers sound like electrostats which is their high frequencies are more delicate with less upper octave sheen and less aparent detail then a really good metal driver, the Heil AMT tweeters are wonderfully musical but do lack a bit of the clarity that you get from the best Beryillium, or Diamond tweeters.
To state that Monitors AMT tweeters are better is sheer ridiculousness, a good driver can be made out of any material, if you like the Monitors that is great, but that doesn't mean their drivers are better or that anyone elses are better, Monitor loudspeakers are very good and have their own set of strengths.
The Kef Reference series are extremely well designed and use state of the art coincidental drivers, The fact that your high frequencies and midrange frequencies are all comming from the same point in space has a lot of advantages over the conventional tweeter above the midrange alignment that most speaker designers do, as designing a properly functioning dual concentric is very difficult to pull off. Kef has been making dual concentric drivers for 11 generations so they feel that they have perfected them.
The OP allready owns a fantastic set of loudspeakers the issue is what he is using to drive them, the Ref 5 are very revealing loudspeakers like any of today's uber high resolution models so all of the matching equipment must be up to snuff.
The AQ cables do have a tendency to sound a bit brighter then some of the other cables and the Vega is very out of date, we used to sell the Vega and it was great 4 years ago but way of date, also the Unitiserve is a good but not fantastic sounding server.
Just changing the server to a server which provides for upsampling will make a very noticable improvement with the Vega.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ
