Vienna Acoustics Kiss vs. Dynaudio Contour S3.4

Hi again Guido

I forgot to add that from what I have seen, the Kiss is a deep speaker - deeper than my current Dynaudio's by about 1 foot.

I currently place my speakers about 4.5 feet from the wall behind them. So with the Kiss, I will only be able to place them about 3.5 feet away from the back wall. Is that enough breathing room?

Hi Mickey, at least in principle, you should be able to find a sweetspot for Kiss within 3.5 feet from the back wall. However, there is no telling where exactly that sweet spot will be... With Vienna speakers, the setup is an empyrical process that yields unique placements in each room.

Kiss is exceedingly nimble and musical, and is more revealing than classic Vienna products... Like with all Vienna products, it can sound too warm or even too shouty if not placed correctly. With correct placement, it is a very neutral speaker, meaning that its frequency distribution does not suffer of hot spots or holes. However, if by "neutral" we mean tonally skinny, Kiss is not '"neutral" at all, because it conveys a significan amount of harmonic content throughout its range... Not being too familiar with Dynaudio speakers, I would prefer to hold off on a conjectural comparison.

It is worth bearing in mind that Kiss is essentially a large bookshelf speaker on an integrated stand... It lacks the lineup of deep bass drivers found in Muzik, Mahler, and Beethoven Imperial. Hence, pairing Kiss with an amp that favors bass may increase its bass cues, but will remain short of generating the visceral authority of the other Vienna speakers that I mentioned.

Saluti, Guido

Well,

here is my diatribe:

Early sound was first recorded for large single thin paper drivers and before that victrolas and the sound was often truncated to reduce the annoying hiss of early phonographs. The advent of the crossover filter changed recording arts again along with the CD and recording adjusted to filtered sound and recorded more on the bright side to make up for the newly truncated sound and clean (no hiss) digital source. Today we have true reference gear phonographs that rival CD in many ways and many of us are going to less filtered loudspeakers which are highly sensitive and uber high-end gear that really play every nuance of the music through these less filtered speakers....when we play some 1980-1990 recordings we are aghast sometimes! Blame the recording no blame the gear or the epoch the evaluation of sound is very difficult to quantify and one could and should write a 600 page book about the history of recording and the gear used to play music... I'll buy it!:

For example, many speak of a speaker that sounds as if its got a blanket over it..another claims his/her speaker is way too bright..so between the recordings adjustments and re-adjusting and loudspeakers non-filtered to filtered to heavily filtered to less filtered to not filtered at all make this impossible to totally delineate as the "players" are always changing and I'm not taking about cd players (I guess this is what makes the hobby fun). Lastly, the chain of blame might look like this: The recording is first to praise or blame, the source is second the amplifier third and the loudspeaker takes the blame for all of the above: however, the loudspeaker often the most innocent as she is just doing as she is told she is just a transducer.

I would suggest a high power tube set up for the KISS the KISS in my book is a masterpiece so very well made and capable of brilliant sound but also capable of less. I would not pair Krell with Kiss but PASS with Kiss if you must have transistor sound.... you might think about a KT120 tube amp or monos!

Unfortunately I think you buy the KISS cause shy's beautiful and capable and then figure the rest out after that.

I have the KISS connected with HiDiamond (HD8) speaker cables, connected to YBA Siganture 100W amplifiers, and I am happy with this combination.

Should the KISS sound harsh at the treble, you can always turn its "head" to suit your taste.