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

Product Information

Adjustments are provided for installations on stands or on desks close to a wall (within 0.5 m) or against a wall (as close as possible allowing for cables). There are also curves for placement on a sole bridge or on a desktop with stands or purpose-built studio desk with monitor platforms. Kali Audio’s opening salvo in the speaker market is a great one. The company set out to design an accurate speaker at a very low price and they have gone and done it with the LP-6s. They really are some of the best monitors you can get at this price and can easily out punch models twice their price or more.

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.These days, with so many of us capable of producing professional-quality masters in domestic environments, the mid-sized monitor is gaining popularity apace. This is no surprise; far from being an unhappy compromise, the eight-inch driver has the potential to offer much of the low-end heft of larger designs (such as our Tannoy Berkeleys) along with the real-world presentation of music as consumed via domestic hi-fi loudspeakers. The power of three I'll describe the benefits of dual-coincident drivers in a few paragraphs time, but first there's a little more general IN‑8 description to run through. The IN‑8 is not a small monitor. I had read the dimensions from the spec sheet before the monitors arrived but I was still slightly surprised at just how substantial an IN‑8 turned out to be in the flesh. At 10.4kg each they're not particularly heavy, so there ought not to be any great issue with mounting arrangements. 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. 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.

The LP-6s deliver a sound that punches well above their price point. If you were to blind test them against speakers a lot higher in price tag, I’m pretty sure you’d be surprised as how well they stand up. Similarly, if you were to do the same against monitors at their price point, I think they’d stand head and shoulders above them. 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 Says Diagram 2: A measurement of the IN‑5’s frequency response, from 100Hz‑20kHz. Second‑ and third‑harmonic distortion is shown in the dotted traces (green and red, respectively).

Soft Dome Tweeter

And so to a little FuzzMeasure analysis. The first question I asked that FuzzMeasure can help with is what frequency is the port tuned to? The answer appears in Diagram 1: a frequency response curve capture by a microphone positioned close up against the bass driver’s diaphragm. While the recently reviewed ribbon-tweeter-equipped ADAM T8Vs impressed with their incisive treble response and snappy transients, they do not produce the cavernous image of the IN-8s. While the smoother-sounding PreSonus Eris E8XTs excel with more organic, natural-sounding music, they don’t quite manage the focus and projection of the IN-8s’ central image. 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. 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. 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.

I mention the LP‑8 because the IN‑8 is actually somewhat related. The architecture of the LP‑8 is a 200mm bass/mid driver integrated with a generously waveguide–loaded 25mm fabric dome tweeter. For the IN‑8, Kali have borrowed the low-frequency elements of the LP‑8 — a similar driver, similar enclosure dimensions and reflex port — but swapped out the waveguide and tweeter for a concentrically arranged compound mid driver and tweeter. It essentially turns the two-way LP‑8 into a three-way design — one that offers the significant benefits of dual-concentric, or rather, dual-coincident, drivers.Also delivered with IN-8s was the new WS-12 subwoofer. These types of speaker are designed to deliver more lower frequency detail, not, it must be said, more bass; they should simply give you a more accurate representation of what you already have. The volume control is indented in the central position, which is recommended for normal use, though while slight adjustment may be necessary in some situations, monitoring levels should be controlled from your mixer or DAW. 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. Kali Audio produce studio monitorsthat are all designed in California, USA. Created by a team of experienced engineers, many of whom previously worked for leading manufacturers, these high-quality speakers unleash incredible sound.