KEF 107 without Kube

I heard them at a dealer without the cube years ago and I was very impressed. Overall good balance imaging and bass was good too. Dealer preferred them without the cube, but I didn't hear it so I cant say.

So I just auditioned them at this dudes house and they were stupid amazing.  The bass was very deep and full for a speaker this size, or almost any size for that matter..  But THEN I found out later that he had turned the bass knob up to +6 to get them to this point.   I felt this was a very, umm, mediocre or cheating way to get the job done.

I really don't like running things through an on-board EQ as it's very imprecise.

I'm not sure of a way around it though with an integrated amp since miniDSP won't work and is just cumbersome in this second system (i.e. I want to keep the wring very simple).

So you thought that it sounded great until you found out why it sounded great, and that ruined it for you. How audiophile of you.

First impressions are not long term satisfaction, so don’t throw shade on other people like that. Especially such one sided and off kilter shade.

the long term result would be as the person said they would personally experience. tha they did not speak of directly, but only indicated. they indicated, in so many words, that this was their experience and way they move in the world.

That they won’t like the sound in the long term. Where the eq characteristics would be understood and heard, in the long term, overall, as a lack of quality in the sonic results.

I’ve owned those speakers before, and I had the cube. What I did is I upgraded the outboard EQ. I changed the power supply, socketed all the opamps therein,and then tested out various opamps....and I even biased them into class A, and so on. It made for a marked improvement. but still, in the end, it is an extra piece of unwanted sound quality damaging electronics--no matter how much I improved it.

It might be ’enough’ for some people’s speed of intelligence (intelligence has cognitive speed/rate as a fundamental) in recognizing faults or hearing faults, over time. It might satisfy some folks desires as tied to that intelligence and applied analysis, and it might do it for a long time.

For some of us, it takes days, or even minutes  -to hear it. Mere seconds, for the more experienced in the given field. (in this case the complex field of audio)