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

Product Information

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. One 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.

Note that the bass unit needs to be located on a desktop, as it is not designed to be floor‑standing and will most likely sound wrong if placed on the floor. It can, however, be set up either horizontally or vertically, so you can choose the arrangement that suits your desk layout. 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. Kalis products are designed and engineered in California, and each of our product lines is named after a town or city in California. Lone Pine, our debut line of studio monitors, gets its name from a town in the Eastern Sierra from which climbers disembark to summit Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the lower 48 states. Much like this climb, we felt that our debut line was ambitious, challenging, and a little risky. Mountain View, an accessory for connecting Bluetooth devices with professional audio systems, was named after the town in which several large tech companies, including Google, are headquartered. As these companies insist on removing physical audio connectors from their devices, we thought this name would be a fun way to put them on notice.Because the LP-6 and LP-8 are so close in frequency response, there is little cause for concern here. Further, room modes can be mitigated with clever placement of the loudspeakers, or acoustic treatments that target problematic frequencies. Aside from the sometimes overgenerous low-end response, our only real criticism of the monitors’ tonal balance is a slight bloom in the upper bass that could be perceived as added warmth. Beyond that, the IN-8s’ clarity, coherence and capaciousness is sweetly seductive. 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. In all our years testing monitors there is really no better feeling than playing a mix you have been working on through better monitors; just hearing the clarity, the extra width and extra dynamic range.

A speaker’s given position in a space can drastically change it’s frequency response. A speaker placed against a wall or on a desk will sound very different than a speaker placed on a stand, even in a well-treated space. Hard surfaces like walls, desk tops, and recording consoles can change the low end frequency response of the monitor, and degrade the overall clarity of the sound. The E8XT is a big, powerful monitor that doesn’t overstep the mark. Simple to set up and, importantly, excellent value for money.Argentina Australia Bolivia Canada Chile Ecuador India Israel Korea Malaysia Mexico Myanmar (Burma) Nigeria Peru Philippines Singapore Thailand Vietnam These compact monitors from new company Kali Audio strike an enticing balance between performance and affordability." - Sound on Sound 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.

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. accordingly. With many monitors – especially at the lower end of the market – you simply don’t get a lot to play with in terms of that adjustment, but with the LP-6s you get a lot, and it really can make a difference. Kali Audio is a manufacturer of best-in-class audio products for the professional audio market. Kali was started in January 2018 by some of the professional audio industry’s most passionate individuals. With engineering at the forefront, Kali aims to make loudspeakers and related products that present the best possible value to our customers. By devoting time and resources to research and development, and with a little bit of panache, we offer high-performance products that fit any budget. This is decent but should you wish to expend the low end, there’s also a new (and absolutely massive) subwoofer in the Kali range, the WS-12 [see boxout]. The [massive] WS-12 sub-wooferOne of the key design specifications for the WS-12 is that it be capable of providing bass management in a 5.1 system where all of the full-range speakers are Kali IN-8s. As such, the WS-12 is powered by a 1000W power amplifier mated to a high-excursion 12-Inch driver. I was always impressed by the level of bass the Ayras could produce given their small driver and cabinet and that holds true to this day, though there’s no doubt the Kali LP-6 has the edge. More so than the extra inch of cone surface would suggest. The larger cabinet helps, but no doubt the efficiency of the driver and the clever port design are major contributors. Not to mention the more modern amplifiers, a total departure from the fully analogue, archaic class AB amps of the RCFs. 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

Kali Audio has solidified themselves as not only a contender in the pro studio monitor market, but a frontrunner in studio monitor technology and advancement." - Charles Hoffman for Sonic Scoop

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).