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Kef Q65.2 tweeter repair and temp replacement with Kef Q5's

wkloppen

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Joined
Mar 9, 2021
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On monday evening a tweeter of the Kef Q65.2 suddenly stopped producing sound. Unmounting the mid/high end unicorn speaker removing the the tweeter it soon became clear the ground wire which leads from the inner housing to the coil was broken and luckily the wire wind coil itself proofed to be ok.
We checked the crossover filter using the other speaker making sure it was indeed the tweeter and not the crossover. Soldering a tiny extension can be daunting for some but with a little patience and steady hands certainly do-able.
Meanwhile the repair we listened to a set of Kef Q5's connected to the same amplifier, a Denon PMA800ne. Although the sound was pretty good it was no match for the Q65.2.
We did a couple of regression tests switching between the speaker sets with various music but the difference was huge. Sources used were streams from Tidal using Audirvana with a dlna renderer (openhome) running on a raspberry PI-4 with a Digo-pro board and then with Coax to the integrated dac in the Denon.

Sound quality experience is obviously subject to individual perception and a lot of other factors but the Q65.2 sounded so much better then the Q5's.....We were glad the repair worked out pretty well.
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Update:
After a couple of weeks listening to the repaired Kef Q65.2 suddenly the new Denon PMA-800NE driving the speakers went into some sort of "safe modus" while producing a very distorted output to the speakers. A red led also come on. Also the repaired tweeter went south again. All in all very strange.
Whether the Denon is broke I can't tell as after a couple of minutes it worked again. Increasing the volume to let say +90% the Denon went bad again. All in all very strange...
Decided to first remove both mid/tweeters from the Q65.2 and replace them with the mid/tweeter's from 2 Kef Q5's. They fit perfectly.
Replaced the Denon with a fully recapped and refurbished Harman Kardon 640 VXi in combination with an SMSL Sanskrit 10-th edition Dac which has a better THD then the built in Dac of the Denon.
Although difficult to really put your finger on, the mid/tweter's of the Q5's sound just a bit more pronounced then the original Q65.2 ones but appear to come to light much better then in the Q5 speaker itself. The combination of the much bigger Q65.2 speaker housing with of course a different bass improves the sound experience quite a bit. We weren't fond of the Q5's but now parts of it have anew destination...:cool:
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