Ratings and Reviews

5.0

1 product rating

Good sound quality

Well designed

Good value

by anjiesocal
Dec 07, 2023
The Bargain Of The Year
The KEF R3 is capable of a lot and absolutely deserves the praise it got when it first debuted nearly 3 years ago. It’s since been displaced by the next generation R3 Meta, which got even more praise. I have not heard the R3 Meta, but I can’t imagine how much better it could actually be since the OG R3 is so good. This is a very revealing speaker. It can tell you something is amiss in your audio chain. When I first hooked it up, I had what I considered a fairly decent setup. The preamp was top notch. The DAC, although not the latest and greatest, still sounded very good and displaced my current reference DAC, the SMSL M400 - a very natural sounding DAC. I even have a DDC, but at the time I used a Pangea HDMI cable for the I2S connection. At first, the R3f sounded very thin. No body or fullness. Very blah. Then my new Tubulus I2S cable came a few days later and wow! There was fullness to the sound and very good separation that I knew that the speakers were capable of! I thought my original Q Accoustics 3010i were fairly good, but this was a several notches above that and approaching that sense of audio Nirvana that I’ve been looking for. If you can find a good used pair, you owe it to yourself to try these out
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-owned

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