Kali Audio LP-6 Professional 6.5" Active Near Field Monitor Studio Speaker, black

Product Information

Settings wise I used the aforementioned dip switch settings for a monitor on a speaker stand less than half a meter from the wall and left everything else alone… initially anyway. The excellent news is that the response across the frequency range does seem to be largely accurate. The bass is tamed and tight for the most part and not coloured. The Kali monitors use switch-mode power supplies, but they are low-noise, over-specified designs that are well built. They automatically adjust to the input voltage and are useable on worldwide mains. I’m confident that these and other Kali monitors will give many years of reliable, dependable performance, and won’t let you down when you have a deadline to meet. The fast roll‑off above 120Hz or so is partly a measurement artefact and partly the bass driver’s low‑pass crossover filter doing its job. What isn’t an artefact, however, is the sharp dip in the response at around 43Hz: that’s the port resonance locally reducing the driver output. So we know now that the port is tuned to 43Hz which, while being a relatively low frequency for such a compact system is also, coincidentally, close to bass guitar bottom E (41.2Hz in concert pitch). In some respects having the port tuned in such a musically significant region is a good thing, in that it reduces the workload of the bass driver. At the same time, however, the port tuning frequency is likely to be the point at which low‑frequency latency is most significant, and similarly, where port distortion and compression effects will be most apparent. Part of the skill in electro‑acoustics, especially on a tight budget, is knowing how best to manage this kind of compromise. While the recently reviewed ribbon-tweeter-equipped ADAM T8Vs impressed with their incisive treble response and snappy transients, they do not produce the cavernous image of the IN-8s. While the smoother-sounding PreSonus Eris E8XTs excel with more organic, natural-sounding music, they don’t quite manage the focus and projection of the IN-8s’ central image. This design, say Kali, delivers a “stereo soundstage that presents the listener with a hyper-realistic level of detail. The soundstage that you hear will have every detail that’s present in the mix”.

The IN-Series monitors have very low distortion. This is the result of unburdening both the woofer and the tweeter, so that both are doing less work; the tweeter is only focused on high frequencies, and the woofer only has to worry about bass.And then there’s the width. You don’t often believe the claims with speaker manufacturers as very often the end results can be so subtle that you barely notice them, instead simply stroking your chin in a knowing way like you really did hear that extra 0.1dB in the high mids. These compact monitors from new company Kali Audio strike an enticing balance between performance and affordability." - Sound on Sound

So here we weren’t really expecting that claimed greater sweet spot but we certainly got it, so much so we nearly wore our chair wheels out rolling around the studio space finding its limits. We’ve enjoyed reviewing the IN-8s so much that it almost pains us that we can’t recommend them to everyone. Diagram 2, just for interest, shows the output from the IN‑8 port captured by a microphone placed a centimetre or two inside. Even though the port data typically captured by this type of measurement is unavoidably 'contaminated' by the bass driver output (especially when the bass driver is so close) it can still reveal if there's any undesirable 'organ-pipe' resonances going on in the port. As revealed in the curve though, the IN‑8 port looks completely clean. A very good, and surprisingly unusual, result.

Soft Dome Tweeter

The RCF monitors are very sweet-sounding. They’re not wholly accurate and one has to become accustomed to their signature sound before any mix will translate properly in the real world. It’s one of the reasons I now use them exclusively for listening, or for non-critical monitoring. They sound wonderful, but nothing beats the instant familiarity of a truly accurate terence monitor. Kali Audio produce studio monitorsthat are all designed in California, USA. Created by a team of experienced engineers, many of whom previously worked for leading manufacturers, these high-quality speakers unleash incredible sound. Specs wise the LP8 frequency response is rated at 39Hz – 25kHz (-10dB) and 47Hz – 21kHz (±3dB). Max SPL is 115dB, and system distortion is rated at <3% (80Hz – 1.7kHz) and <2% above 1kHz, reference a 90dB output SPL at a distance of 1 m. The crossover point is 1.5kHz. You rarely see such a usefully low crossover point in a monitor of this price. They’re usually somewhere around the 2-3kHz range, where the ear is most sensitive to crossover distortion, phase and timing errors. On-axis response measured on a ground plane with 1/6th octave smoothing Opt for the LP8 and you gain an extra 2Hz base extension, 2dB in max SPL, and better distortion figures; <2.5% (80 Hz – 400 Hz) and <1.4% above 400 Hz, with the same 90dB SPL at 1 m. The crossover point is slightly higher at 1.8kHz, still well within the range that is most pleasing to the ear. The LP8 will better fill a larger room though and is better suited to environments where more than two people will be listening to the monitors.