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

Product Information

The purpose of this test is to illustrate how much (if at all) the output changes as a speaker’s components temperature increases (i.e., voice coils, crossover components). From mixing and mastering to video production and DJing, the LP-6 can adapt to any situation. Designed to offer highly transparent sound at an affordable price. Capture every nuance from your mix and hear subtle details that conventional speakers will miss. Transparent sound ensures that your mix will translate well to different mediums. This means no matter what system you play your music on it will sound at its best. Destiny 2 was thoroughly enjoyable with the Kali LP-6. I could feel the power of my weapons through the speakers. Explosions had great depth, the spoken language of the Fallen sounded menacing, and even when the firefight was messy it felt like an organized cacophony. None of the sounds were jumbled together. They all had their defined place. These compact monitors from new company Kali Audio strike an enticing balance between performance and affordability. With the LP-6 and LP-8, you can mix with more confidence, and you can also be assured that your mix will translate as best as possible to whatever systems your audience is using. 3-D Imaging Waveguide

Temperature was around 60 degrees F which is on the cool side but I don't think there is an impact on the data. Mike Doughty’s vocal stylings on Soul Coughing’s Screenwriter’s Blues fit perfectly between the instrumentation without any of his words being covered or obscured. The thud of the bass drum is nice and round while the high hat sparkles behind him. Bass and synth show off the width of the soundfield that the LP-6 provides. The high end can get a little forward, so some might want to bring the HF trim down 2 dB. It certainly mellows it out a bit without losing the sparkle. Purchasing Guide Sound Power represents all the sounds arriving at the listening position after any number of reflections from any direction. It is the weighted rms average of all 70 measurements, with individual measurements weighted according to the portion of the spherical surface that they represent. On most port tubes, air leaves at different speeds from different points of the opening, creating noisy turbulence. This turbulence can be heard as “chuffing,” or an audible air sound coming from the monitor. This sound will add to the noise floor and obscure the details of the low end. There has been some bad information about this, so we thought we'd clear some things up! The LP-6 and LP-8 and IN-8 do all hiss. The LP-8 is the worst of the bunch, about 2 dB worse than LP-6. IN-8 is the quietest, about 1 dB better than LP-6. In the entire time we've been making these speakers, we have not instituted any changes that would make this performance better or worse. We have done spot audits to see if any units were particularly worse than any others, and we have never found that to be the case.Output power is 40W for the treble and 40 / 60W for the midbass, LP-6 and LP8 respectively. Maximum listening distance is 2.9 m for the LP-6 and 3.6 m for the LP8. Kali’s maximum listening distance figures define the distance at which the speakers can maintain a continuous 85dB SPL with 20dB of dynamic headroom, allowing for large momentary peaks to be played at reference volume without overload or distortion. The shape of the bass port is also meant to prevent the sound of “chuffing,” which is noisy turbulence created by air leaving the port at different speeds. When your speakers produce clean low-end, mids and highs feel less cluttered as a result. Kali Audio only launched at the start of 2018 but it already has big ambitions, a great naming philosophy and a debut monitor that seems, on the face of it, to be incredible value for money. The Southern Californian’s first release is the LP-6, the ‘LP’ standing for ‘Lone Pine’ (which is actually a small town in the Eastern Sierra that is the first port of call for climbers wishing to scale Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the United States outside of Alaska, fact fans). Measurements that you are about to see were performed using the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). This is a robotic measurement system that analyzes the speaker all around and is able (using advanced mathematics and dual scan) to subtract room reflections (so where I measure it doesn't matter). It also measures the speaker at close distance ("near-field") which sharply reduces the impact of room noise. Both of these factors enable testing in ordinary rooms yet results that can be more accurate than anechoic chamber. In a nutshell, the measurements show the actual sound coming out of the speaker independent of the room. With a pair of Kali Audio LP-6 studio monitors, you should be able to achieve a usable sound without expensive speaker calibration software and an advanced understanding of room acoustics and acoustic treatment. However, if you’re looking to sound-treat your studio for an optimized listening experience, this acoustic treatment guide for home studios is a great place to start.

These compact monitors from new company Kali Audio strike an enticing balance between performance and affordability." - Sound on Sound Focal’s Alpha 65 brings you a 6.5” woofer and a 40-22,000 Hz frequency response. The frequency response of these monitors isn’t quite as wide as the other studio monitors on this list. However, sub frequencies should be handled by a subwoofer anyways, while the linear response of frequencies between 20-20,000 Hz is arguably more important than a speaker’s maximum frequency value. You can learn how to properly set up a studio subwoofer here. 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. I was immediately right at home with the LP-6s. They sound organic and natural, uncoloured and clean, just like the IN-8s that I am so fond of. They have a surprisingly rich, deep bass response given their comparatively small cabinets and drivers. The bass isn’t as impactful as the IN-8s, nor as authoritative, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. It’s refined though, without too much blurring around the edges of sustained notes and without audible colouration at high listening levels. The speakers also produce very little idle noise so won’t become irritating if you’re close to them in an extreme near-field setup.Looks like our problem is that port resonance is too high and at a frequency where the woofer is already being rolled off. So as a result it causes those two bumps in the woofer response. The tweeter also has a rise above 10 kHz which seems to be diffraction based as it did not show up in off-axis response. The new LP-6 V2 is part of Kali’s 2nd Wave of loudspeakers. 2nd Wave products draw on 3 years of R&D for across-the-board improvements. A new amplifier platform allows for 12 dB less noise, while input sensitivity has been increased by 3 dB. The tuning has been refined for smoother HF response, and the boundary EQs have been updated to reflect common real-world use cases. Physical improvements include lighter transducer cones for better transient response and upgraded cabinet construction for greater reliability. The midbass driver is an optimised paper cone construction with large dual-layer voicecoil, convex dust cap and carefully tuned surround, giving plenty of excursion but maintaining the integrity of the cone around its outer circumference where the cone is naturally weaker. The tweeter waveguide ensures that the acoustic centres of the drivers are as aligned as much as possible, though there’s plenty of opportunity to correct for any time alignment and phase error in the digital crossover.