I’ve had the K62 sub for a couple of weeks in our den area (with LS50 ii wireless), and I’ve been blown away by the low end coming out of this thing, which seems impossible given its size. This is replacing an 12 inch SVS that I’m holding for my brother while he’s deployed, and it keeps up in pretty much every way, with many caveats. Price aside, and specs aside as I’m just giving it an ear test mostly, it’s perfect for what I need.
1. I live in an apartment (well insulated for sound), but still an apartment. I’m guessing my max listening level is around 85db at 10 feet away from my speakers. I didn’t measure with an spl meter, but in my recording studio I’m religious about having one of my mixing levels be 85db on my near fields, so I have 85db burned into my brain. My average listening level is probably in the mid 70s?- I’m not great at estimating between 2 dB points.
2. The K62 doesn’t have the output to keep up (maybe around 25-30 hz?) when I crank the system well above 85db, but I never really listen this loud so I don’t care, and if I do it’s for a short time to pump myself up or something so I’m not really listening critically.
3. The den where I have this set up is a bad room- 2 walls of windows, a tile floor, and a concrete ceiling, and (after a little work placing the sub and adding in some strategic room treatment) it sounds great. So the K62 seems to take well to bad rooms, as do the LSW50s.
4. Using the KEF system for home theater is secondary to music for me (I like going to movies for the full experience), and with that criteria I think it works well. But, for wall shaking explosions on the low end where you want that extra 10db (i tested it playing the first robbery in Heat, with the truck smashing into the armor car and the armored car’s door being blown), you need a bigger subwoofer. Again, I really don’t care about that, and the KEF still sounds great, it just may not give you that room shaking rattle and thump for big volume jumps, like sudden explosions, in movies.
5. If space weren’t an issue I’d get 2 subs for around the same price as the K62. I mean maybe not though, as it’s not like I feel like I’m missing anything. Sure, when I use my recording/mixing engineer ears, I can sometimes hear an awkward transition in the bass with a hump that could theoretically be smoothed out, but that’s not how I listen to music. Almost all recorded music, probably all, is a series of compromises made when recording and mixing, and has the quirks and preferences of whoever recorded, mixed and mastered the recording. I mean the final product has to sound good through a high end system, speakers in bar, in a bass thumpy SUV, on computer speakers, AirPods etc. if everyone listened to music through the exact same ‘audiophile’ system, every recording could be mixed better to fit that system, but bring in another listening system, and it may sound worse.
So a very, very long way of saying that the KEF62 with the LSW50s gets me to a place where I can fully enjoy the music and not listen to the system. That point is obviously different for everyone, but I’m more than satisfied in my technical ‘downgrade’ from systems I’ve had before. I’m not trying to belittle the audiophile hobby or anything, and I’m lucky to be able to get my obsessive sound tweaking tendencies out when mixing so I can just find a good system and enjoy the music when listening recreationally.
TLDR: for an apartment where space is an issue and where you don’t get too much above 85db, the K62 will give you what you would get out of a much bigger subwoofer.
[edit]- funny enough I don’t think the LSW50s even really need a sub for the most part, depending on what kind of music you listen to. The bass goes pretty deep (sounds like mid, maybe even low?!? 40s, for some reason I never actually checked the specs), which is crazy for such tiny speakers and I have trouble believing my ears. But this is the first time I’ve used such small speakers, so maybe this is common now(?!). I just like that low end pound for EDM and hip hop so I wanted to find the smallest sub I could to replace the space hogging SVS, but seriously, I was surprised at how good the bass sounded without adding a sub]
