KEF Blade Two - Unbelieveable

IMO, just because you liked a set of speakers at some show doesn’t mean you can get the same performance: good or bad. There are many things that you have to consider before making a purchase of some speaker you liked:

1) listening room. You might have loved the sound of the Wilson Chronosonic XVX speakers in a treated room of 30’ x 20’ x 15’ but don’t think you can get the same sound in a 15’ x 12’ x 8’ room.

2) audio equipment/system synergy matched to your speakers. You might have heard these Wilson’s with $300k or more worth of equipment and you might not have that level of equipment that might be needed to get the best sound out of a certain speaker.

The best bet is to find a speaker you like and demo it in your house with your equipment to tell if you like the sound quality or not

Before I spend $25k on any set of speakers, my room must be in perfect shape/treated so I can get the best out of my speaker.

yyz, for your room, I wouldn’t make a $25k investment and put them in this room. The room is the most important piece of your system, bad room, bad sound, no matter what you put in it.

As for Hegel, I e owned a few of their integrateds. They were nice but compromised. Their power is decent, but when you compare their power vs a standalone amp with the same claimed power, the Hegel falls short. I had the top of the line Hegel at the time and when I went with separates with the same power, the new power amp controlled the speaker much better.

The 2nd thing that’s compromised in the Hegel is the dac. I never used the internal dac because it just wasn’t that good. I have a really nice highly rated external dac. But 1 year at rmaf, in the Hegel room, I had them compare the built in dac in the h360 to their standalone dac, no comparison. Hegel isn’t the only vendor that compromises, when I went with separates, my new McIntosh preamp had a so called high quality dac built in and it was also just so so, I didn’t use it either. I bring this up because the h590 is up near $12k now, why compromise at this price? Depending on your setup, if you have an all digital setup, $12k will get you a high quality dac and amp (no preamp necessary), just go from dac to the amp