Mario Sanchez
Active Member
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2021
- Messages
- 161
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- 279
Greetings, fellow members of ASR.
I recently laid my eyes on the new KEF R Meta series, purchasing one R6 Meta unit first and ordering two more for LCR duty a few days back, which arrived earlier today. It was a pleasant surprise as the projected arrival time is quite a bit later this week, but the surprise quickly turned into a scare. The protagonist unit in this incident is an R6 Meta with Serial Number R220601302AP48B1GN. I had only thought about reporting this after the matter, so please excuse the scarcity of photographic evidence.
After setting up the pair and playing some music, I immediately noticed one of the units sounded off in the midrange. I then ran a sweep, and there were audible distortion when the sweep hit the upper mids, I decided to give the unit a quick near-field measurement, driving only the uni-Q, which gave me the result below, note that this was freehanded at ~10cm so it isn't representative of SPL@1m:
Scary, isn't it? I thought so too, so I contacted my seller to query about the possibility for an exchange, while attempting to isolate the issue.
Eyeballing the above THD sweep, the distortion anomaly happens all across the treble and decays rapidly beneath the 1KHz mark, suggesting that the tweeter was the offending component. It was then that I noticed some particulates stuck on the tweeter assembly which appeared akin to sawdust. I pulled out a lense cleaner and gave the assembly a nice gush to rid the assembly of the particulates, for who can stand the idea of dusty particles defiling their speaker? I then decided to re-measure the unit to see if it changed anything. and surprise surprise, it went away:
Now, while unpacking the speaker, I actually noticed similar particulates stuck on the surface of the particular unit's cabinet, and closer examination revealed some more of it stuck near the trim ring of one of the woofers. I carefully removed the trim ring on the woofer, and there it was (excuse the blurry photo, I'm on my backup phone and the camera isn't great)
For comparison, here is the other woofer unit with the trim ring also removed:
You might have noticed the difference. There are particulates in the right woofer's cutout, there were also some of this particulate stuck on the trim ring itself. Here's a closer shot, this time I pulled out a better camera. This was done after I gave the dusty side a wipedown, though you can still see the particulates in areas I can't quite reach:
And again a shot of the other woofer at the same location for comparison:
I also carefully removed the trim rings of the other units, and all of them were like the second photo, which reinforces my belief that the right woofer on my offending unit was the culprit of this whole incident.
Personally, my partially educated guess is that something happened during the machining of the MDF part of this unit's cabinet, resulting in a higher-than-usual amount of dust particulates in the cutout housing the woofer's trim ring. This is initially fine, as the particulates are constrained to the woofer cutout by the presence of the trim ring, meaning the speaker passes the factory QC without a problem. During transportation, however, some of these particulates went loose from vibration and handling, which would explain the curious presence of particulates inside the foam sheet wrapping of the speaker, some of the particulates ended up on the surface of the speaker, and some into the tweeter assembly, resulting in a distortion anomaly.
As of now, the speaker has been restored to functionality, and once it was clear of the distortion issues, a captivating experience ensued. I'm not the best at putting my feeling to words, so I'll leave the subjective impression to someone more well-versed than I do. I don't plan to return or exchange them, but still, I feel the need to report this issue, and let it be seen, such that if others were unfortunate enough to encounter a similar incident, they might find this information helpful, and in hopes that some revisions can be made the QC process of this speaker, reducing the possibility for episodes like these to occur in the future.
May we all find performant audio gears which we can live out the rest of our lives with.
I recently laid my eyes on the new KEF R Meta series, purchasing one R6 Meta unit first and ordering two more for LCR duty a few days back, which arrived earlier today. It was a pleasant surprise as the projected arrival time is quite a bit later this week, but the surprise quickly turned into a scare. The protagonist unit in this incident is an R6 Meta with Serial Number R220601302AP48B1GN. I had only thought about reporting this after the matter, so please excuse the scarcity of photographic evidence.
After setting up the pair and playing some music, I immediately noticed one of the units sounded off in the midrange. I then ran a sweep, and there were audible distortion when the sweep hit the upper mids, I decided to give the unit a quick near-field measurement, driving only the uni-Q, which gave me the result below, note that this was freehanded at ~10cm so it isn't representative of SPL@1m:
Scary, isn't it? I thought so too, so I contacted my seller to query about the possibility for an exchange, while attempting to isolate the issue.
Eyeballing the above THD sweep, the distortion anomaly happens all across the treble and decays rapidly beneath the 1KHz mark, suggesting that the tweeter was the offending component. It was then that I noticed some particulates stuck on the tweeter assembly which appeared akin to sawdust. I pulled out a lense cleaner and gave the assembly a nice gush to rid the assembly of the particulates, for who can stand the idea of dusty particles defiling their speaker? I then decided to re-measure the unit to see if it changed anything. and surprise surprise, it went away:
Now, while unpacking the speaker, I actually noticed similar particulates stuck on the surface of the particular unit's cabinet, and closer examination revealed some more of it stuck near the trim ring of one of the woofers. I carefully removed the trim ring on the woofer, and there it was (excuse the blurry photo, I'm on my backup phone and the camera isn't great)
For comparison, here is the other woofer unit with the trim ring also removed:
You might have noticed the difference. There are particulates in the right woofer's cutout, there were also some of this particulate stuck on the trim ring itself. Here's a closer shot, this time I pulled out a better camera. This was done after I gave the dusty side a wipedown, though you can still see the particulates in areas I can't quite reach:
And again a shot of the other woofer at the same location for comparison:
I also carefully removed the trim rings of the other units, and all of them were like the second photo, which reinforces my belief that the right woofer on my offending unit was the culprit of this whole incident.
Personally, my partially educated guess is that something happened during the machining of the MDF part of this unit's cabinet, resulting in a higher-than-usual amount of dust particulates in the cutout housing the woofer's trim ring. This is initially fine, as the particulates are constrained to the woofer cutout by the presence of the trim ring, meaning the speaker passes the factory QC without a problem. During transportation, however, some of these particulates went loose from vibration and handling, which would explain the curious presence of particulates inside the foam sheet wrapping of the speaker, some of the particulates ended up on the surface of the speaker, and some into the tweeter assembly, resulting in a distortion anomaly.
As of now, the speaker has been restored to functionality, and once it was clear of the distortion issues, a captivating experience ensued. I'm not the best at putting my feeling to words, so I'll leave the subjective impression to someone more well-versed than I do. I don't plan to return or exchange them, but still, I feel the need to report this issue, and let it be seen, such that if others were unfortunate enough to encounter a similar incident, they might find this information helpful, and in hopes that some revisions can be made the QC process of this speaker, reducing the possibility for episodes like these to occur in the future.
May we all find performant audio gears which we can live out the rest of our lives with.
