What bad reviews are you seeing? What do they say about them?
I second this and have not seen that pile of " bad reviews" either.
I see lots of users selling them shortly after they bought them and being very disappointed. It might have to do with the reviews over-selling their bass, or with something else.
Still, have not seen lots of users selling their R3's, and I'm a member of the Facebook official Kef owners group, routinely search on local selling Apps and Hifishark.com. As Napilopez said, this can be explained by the usual counterculture attitude, speaking up against the few ones that got a high score and good measurements.
But mostly I think this mismatch in perception comes from 2 factors:
- People are VERY used to listening to colored sound signatures ("spicy sound"). Once they listen to something more neutral they feel is lifeless or dull...but I'm sorry, they are wrong. This kind of user usually has zero experience with calibration, house curves, room acoustics interaction, parametric Eq, etc. What happens is that they have some great expectations and think they will enter the Valhalla if they upgrade their low end-mid end speaker to this well-measured one. They start playing music and an audiophile vortex has not opened to their ears...they are listening to things much more correctly than before, the problem is they don't know that to listen for, they come from appreciating high distortion, uneven directivity, high discrepancies in frequency response and power response that "spice up" the music.
- Users that have zero experience with calibration, house curves, room acoustics interaction, parametric Eq, etc; enter ASR because they are music/sound "enthusiasts" and discover this speaker. They see this is objectively a great speaker and buy it with high expectations, take it out of the box, place it in their room, and think that the job is done. No wonder maybe something is wrong when you are having extreme comb filtering, SBIR issues, room modes excited, not enough separation between the speakers, etc. With this particular speaker, those are not real issues because of great directivity, but bass room modes are inherent to any speaker.
Those are the usual suspects you will find endlessly recommending a $6000 amp to "take the most" out of your LS50. Or asking why people use dual subwoofers. How much a $500 cable made their LS50 sing correctly, etc....You have seen them, I have seen them.
Some mention that they are not very subtle, and a bit harsh, and ... hold on... "lifeless". I can understrand that hard metallic cone has a sound signature of its own, but I do not see this reflected in the measurements (assuming cone breakup is already being taken care of by 20dB+ attenuation below main frequency response SPL)
It looks like a well engineered loudspeaker, but I can't shake the idea that we are missing something here.
Again, "hard metallic cone" is just a subjective perception people I did describe above came up. One of the measurable factors that describe this is when the dome breaks up near 20kHz or below so it becomes audible. As you have noticed there are usually Zero backings in those claims and there is nothing in Amir's or other site measurements that showings this. Kef Whitepaper kindly describes how the tweeter dome is constructed with special double-layer geometry and break up is well beyond 20khz.
That measured in-room response uploaded by Napilopez is from my living room, the most irregular room you could find, and speakers not properly placed yet with low separation between them. Still, I consider they measure excellent given the cited constraints. And it strikes me how I can walk all around the living room and even enter some sort of hallway and notice the special evenness in response. I walk all over the place and the tonal balance past 500Hz change is very low and subtle. This is something I have not experienced with normal 2-way or 3-way designs.
Another thing to consider with
Concentric-Coaxial designs and good DI speakers is that what you see On-Axis on Amir's measurements won't directly translate to what you hear. PIR and Power Response match much better my In-Room measurements. So all that fuzz about elevated treble kind of fades away once you notice that past 2kHz the treble gently rolls off.
The famous 1kHz dip shows up on the measurement but very subtle. What makes it more visual is that below you have elevated bass (room interaction-build up) and above there is a small 2kHz peak. This places the 1khz dip at the bottom of an imaginary "V" letter. All of this can be and SHOULD BE corrected with PEQ.
Most of this talk is more technical or academic than anything...at the end of the day all I listen is good sound even with the given constraints and the only thing that sometimes could stand up are the room modes: the peaks and dips in the bass response below especially below 100hz where the fluctuations are at its maximum.
And even then this isn't that much problematic since the hearing system is smart enough to let you filter this out, like some little voice in your head telling you "yeah I know those room modes are present, they are inherent to any speaker in a room, I'll forget you for being too lazy no not address it yet with propper PEQ, but I know you will do it sooner or later..."
Now we are coming back to point 1 & 2. These speakers have a lot of bass extension and clean output for their size, rivaling many floor standers. This is a double side sword. If you care about placement and PEQ for those bass peaks and dips you are on the clear. But if you are not going to take care of any of this, this speakers are many times more prone to excite the room modes than smaller speakers.
That's the dichotomy of Hi-Fi audio when sometimes you are fine with small or cheap speakers, start to upgrade to serious gear and disappoint because you are either not that engaged listening to a correct response, or you don't get the desired results because you don't spend the proper amount of time to propper set up the system of educating yourself about all the acoustic phenomenon involved in sound reproduction.
I would take any day 1 positive review/opinion from someone with credentials than 100 bad reviews from clueless users who saw a speaker measured great, bought it, and did not like it because didn't know what to look or care for. But that's just my opinion.
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