Witness The End Of "What"?
Expect onscreen dialogue to feel like an intimate conversation (or a knock-down, drag-out fight) when this center channel speaker is tasked with anchoring all talking to the screen. With an innovative second-generation Uni-Q Array and no less than four 3" long-throw bass drivers, each with its own ultra-low distortion motor, you know that the sound image produced by the 6000 Series KHT6000 speaker featuring ACE technology will be so real you can almost touch it. Front and center, you'll find a Uni-Q Array with KEF's latest aluminium-dome tweeter set at the acoustic center of a 3" midrange cone, ensuring that vocals are going to sound clear, warm, and beautifully balanced wherever you sit. The separate Uni-Q enclosure utilizes ACE technology to move the enclosure resonance below the working frequency range and absorb higher frequency acoustic notes. Not that you'll notice it after the first few minutes: Jurassic fiasco, dirt track sprint car roll over, or Yo Yo Ma nestling in with his cello, you'll be lost in the world of your choice.
Acoustic Compliance Enhancement (But You Can Call Me ACE)
The holy grail of loudspeaker design has always been to generate big bass from small boxes. The trouble is, the laws of physics make this almost impossible to achieve, as bass extension relates directly to efficiency and cabinet size. Continuing a 40-year tradition of genuine design innovation, KEF engineers have now developed a way of overcoming this apparently insoluble limitation. It's called Acoustic Compliance Enhancement (ACE), and it works like this: in conventional speakers, cone motion is restricted by the acoustic pressure in the enclosure as the air is alternately compressed and expanded by the cone moving in and out. The smaller the enclosure, the greater the pressure that acts on the cone. By dramatically reducing this pressure, ACE allows the cone to move as freely as it would in a much larger cabinet, generating bass extension all out of proportion to its actual size. This is achieved by introducing granules of activated carbon into the enclosure—a material containing millions of pores ranging in size from visible fissures to holes a few molecules across. By introducing activated carbon into the enclosure of a loudspeaker, the effective compliance of that enclosure can be enhanced at low frequencies by between 150% and 300% in a practical design. With ACE, the drive unit behaves as if it were in an enclosure up to three times the size of the actual enclosure. In layman's terms, what you get out of all this is enhanced mid-range definition and extended bass response. In even simpler terms, this speaker kicks butt, like the littlest kid on the playground who picks fights with the big boys... and wins.
Uni-Q Array Explained...
KEF's KHT series incorporates the Uni-Q technology, something originally designed for one of the world's finest speaker models, KEF's legendary Reference Series. With each generation of speakers, KEF expands on and improves their Uni-Q offerings. The Uni-Q concept is based on using aerospace materials to make the tweeter small enough to place at the acoustic center of the bass/midrange cone. With both drive units on exactly the same axis and sharing the same waveguide, they behave as a single point source that projects a more natural sound image over a much larger area than the usual tiny sweet spot.
And Explained...
The Uni-Q configuration eliminates the inherent problems of having the separate midrange and high frequency drive units of a conventional speaker. As loudspeaker radiation varies according to frequency, low frequency and high frequency drivers have intrinsically different radiation patterns whose directivity, known as Q, changes at the crossover frequency. Interference, or lobing, between the two units causes a dip in power response around this frequency, with a peak above it due to their differences in directivity. These factors introduce colorations that muddy the sound image. You get no such problems with Uni-Q. Being coincident and perfectly time-aligned, the directivity of both LF and HF units is controlled by the profile of the midrange cone, with no possible path or phase differences between the two, and no lobing interference at the crossover. In other words, the Q is unified--hence the name Uni-Q. So instead of narrowing toward the crossover and then widening again as is the case with separate drive units, the Uni-Q radiation pattern remains stable. Power response is uniform, with smoother variations on- and off-axis. The acoustic image is better balanced and more natural sounding across both direct and reverberant fields. Multi-channel imaging is noticeably clearer and more accurate.
And Interpreted...
No matter where you put the speaker, and no matter where you sit, you'll get the same rich sound. No more bolting everything in place to make sure you're located at the optimal listening spot. All the notes, tones, pitches, and sounds the speakers have to offer travel in a group so you hear them all evenly, everywhere. It's almost enough to make a person tear up.
