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

Product Information

Kali Audio’s unique front port is another result of extensive R&D and is a huge boon for small or bedroom studios where you need to place your monitors near a wall. This shape came about from running airflow simulations on a dedicated engineering laptop for four days straight. It fixes many of the issues that front-firing ports face, eliminates noise and lets you position your speakers anywhere in your studio space without worrying about unruly bass frequencies. The innovative waveguide design is another product of Kali Audio’s meticulous research process and ensures that the sound is spread out in an ideal way. This gives you a clear and detailed stereo image that you’d usually find on a much more expensive monitor. Best-in-class Woofers The bass driver is a nominally 200mm (8–inch) unit with a polymer–coated paper diaphragm. This style of diaphragm construction is becoming more common, and I suspect the appeal is that it offers the advantages of paper's light weight and rigidity combined with the damping and more 'engineered' look of plastic. The dust cap of the IN‑8 bass driver is slightly unusual in that it is fitted in concave orientation rather than the more usual convex. Probably of more significance in terms of the performance of the driver, however, is that the dust cap is attached to the end of the voice coil former rather than, as is more often the case, to the diaphragm. All other things being equal it's a subtle little manufacturing detail that I like for its purity and simplicity. Not only does this allow producers to create interesting spatial effects, but it means that you can work faster and with more confidence. An accurate soundstage lets you “see” each element of the mix in front of you, so you can hear exactly what happens when you make changes. It also means that the midrange needs to stay still. In many other co-axial or concentric systems, high excursion from the larger driver causes intermodulation distortion, and degrades the accuracy of the system. The midrange on the IN-Series is limited to less than 1 millimeter peak-to-peak excursion, making it acoustically stationary while still providing midrange to keep up with the powerful woofer and tweeter.

Convincing imaging is a major plus-point of this phase coherence. The stereo imaging is excellent, presenting a wide, cinemascope-like soundstage with first-rate left-to-right separation. Similarly, central images – lead vocals in particular – are tightly focused with no sense of vagueness or drift. Another dimension This design ensures solid phase coherence throughout the broad midrange and treble regions, avoiding the phase anomalies that plague poorly designed two-way monitors with a mid/bass driver and tweeter at different points on the front baffle. way systems with good waveguides, like Kali’s LP-6 and LP-8, do a good job at conveying this spatial information. However, because the tweeter and woofer on those speakers (and most studio monitors!) are separate, this information gets lost in the space immediately above and below the speaker. This means that at the listening position, you’re not hearing the full stereo picture. In practical terms, what this means is that you’re hearing spatial details in the recording that allow your brain to place elements of the recording in the space around you. This gives the speakers a more natural, lifelike feel that exposes more of the detail of the material that you’re working on. This level of detail makes it easier to make critical decisions, as well as making these monitors pleasurable to mix on and listen to in general.

Both models use 40W for the 1” soft dome tweeter. The LP-6 uses 40W for the 6.5-Inch woofer, and the LP-8 uses 60W for the 8-Inch woofer. EASE OF USE 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.

The cabinets comprise a vinyl-wrapped MDF with moulted plastic front baffle. The front port tube is moulded as part of the baffle itself, and is shaped using computer simulation to minimise port chuffing by ensuring that air exits the port at a constant velocity. A similar port is used to great effect in the IN-8, and I find them to be entirely unfussy about room placement and without the sonic downsides I often hear in ported loudspeakers, namely bloated bass caused by the constricted passage of air through the port, or puffing noises as large volumes of air are forced through a thin port tube. MusicRadar verdict: Kali Audio made a splash with the LP monitors and the IN-8s are just as dramatic a release. This is serious pro monitoring at a fantastic price. Highly recommended. The Web SaysOne of the features present in the second wave of Kali monitors is a clever Boundary EQ adjustment, which provides several positions to select preset compensating EQ curves depending on where the speaker is positioned. On a stand in free space (the ideal position for the loudspeaker) the EQ can be disabled. Taking up the space in between in the hero of the IN-Series: the 4-Inch, profile-optimized midrange driver. This driver has a lot of work to do. In addition to reproducing midrange frequencies, it also acts as the waveguide for the tweeter. This means that the shape needed to be precisely engineered to provide an ideal dispersion characteristic for the tweeter. All rooms are subject to a phenomenon called room modes, where bass builds up in certain parts of the room, and cancels in other parts of the room. Room modes can make it hard to make critical decisions about the bass in your mix. This phenomenon can be particularly bad in small rooms, and many people choose to use smaller speakers in these rooms. The thought is that, because the smaller speaker doesn’t play as low, it will be less likely to excite room modes and overwhelm the room with bass.