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KEF Q150 Bookshelf Speakers, A Review
Late last year as I began looking into a pair of passive bookshelf speakers for my turntable setup, I asked around enthusiast forums and reading a lot of reviews for different brands and models. After feeling rather overwhelmed due to the great array of choices, narrowed down my choices to the following: Chane A1.4, Klipsch RP-600M, and the KEF Q150. Honestly, I thought either of them would fit my requirements well and I’m fairly certain I would be just as happy with either of the other two choices. Even though I wasn’t planning on forking the money at the time, a Black Friday deal for the Q150 came up and it was too good to pass up and thus the deal was closed. At the time of writing I’ve listened to them roughly 200 hours in the last 30 days. Below are my impressions.
Review disclaimer: I’ve received feedback from a reader insinuating I’m receiving compensation from vendors for writing these reviews in my blog. I want to make this super clear: I do not receive compensation of any kind for writing these reviews (other than these reviews being part of Medium’s paywall). There are no kick-backs or discounts, etc. All gear I review is bought from amazon or other e-commerce sites by me with my money. All links I provide in my reviews are referrer-program-free and most permalinks which can be found via google search. I do these reviews because I love writing and I love sharing my thoughts on gear I buy which hopefully are useful to others.
Audition stack: Emotiva TA-100 (receiver for digital, radio and phono), Tidal MQA, and FM radio from the Emotiva
Aesthetics: gorgeous. Super understated design, clean lines and visually-interesting Uni-Q Driver (both twitter and mid/bass cone are concentric). However, — and this might matter to you — they are not small. I would say they are on the large side of things for being ‘bookshelf’ size. To be clear, they’re not visually bothersome in any way or take large amounts of real estate, quite the opposite, they’re just a bit larger than what I had envisioned.
Sound:
Sub-bass and bass: given the driver size and the specs, I was expecting this would be the weaker aspect of these speakers. Much to my surprise, the bass is quite punchy and it dips rather deep. Very high fidelity rendition and without any discernible coloration…
