Received my replacement for the the blemished R11. They look and sound fine.
Yay Sean!
Glad to hear it all worked out for you in the end. Though I know you have qualms in terms of the value of the new R11’s over your current speakers, I‘m really pleased with mine. What’s passed has passed, and I hope your experience proves to be positive from here on out.
Observations…
I did have to push in the rings around the coaxial driver so they were below the plane of the front baffle as per spec. Not a huge thing, but a surprisingly big impact on performance. KEF needs to fix this issue if they haven’t with the Meta series.
Not impressed with the packaging. The foam endcaps were beefy enough, but the box… for such a heavy speaker, not so much in my opinion. Though my speakers were fine, the box was punctured and even torn through to the bag that wrapped the speaker…not exactly confidence inspiring. At 6k a pair, double boxing doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable expectation. Though they came strapped standing up on a pallet, the pallet itself was built from very poor quality 1/2” plywood and some kind of incredibly cheesy wood composite blocks that were falling apart. The speakers were leaning heavily to one side, the center bottom pallet support completely missing. Shipping issues, but ones that could have been mitigated by a bit more care on KEF’s part.
Were your original speakers repackaged? I won’t weigh in on that, but I’m pretty sure that KEF likely has had lots of damaged product out there.